Pre work and travel

A few weeks before travelling to Microsoft Partners In Learning Global Forum I had attended three livemeets. These set the scene for being a Mentor and also set some collaborative tasks to get the mentors working and talking together.

This proved to be rather difficult for me as these took place twice a day to cover the globe but on my local time they took place at 6am and 4pm. I couldn’t get access to the live meeting at school as the live login is blocked. I did make it home for one of the 4pm times but I had to attend (Is that the right word?) the 6am meets. Fortunately these did not involve me being on camera so I could be ‘relaxed’ about my image. The last one though took place after the clocks changed, and yes you guessed it, I arrived for the end of the meeting.

I enjoyed using OneNote 2010 hosted on Skydrive to collaborate with others and answer some questions. The really interesting part is OneNote web apps and live sharing on that.

 

Getting too and from Islay can be an adventure. Yes we are 2 hours on a ferry from the mainland and yes that ferry is over 2 hours drive from the nearest city (Glasgow) but by plane its less than 30 minutes to Glasgow. And that's what I did on the morning of Saturday 5th November.

A chilly but bright day and a stunning flight across from the west. I could see right up into the highlands with its high ground covered in fresh snow.

I still had another day to go before I headed south. Some last minute shopping like a new kilt pin to go with my new kilt.

I was fortunate in that while I was in Glasgow I had the oppertunity to attend a Teachmeet. This was teachmeet EPA (Enterprise Practitioners Association). This was a great event bringing a whole load of new people to TeachMeets and then to Twitter. Loads of great ideas as always at a TeachMeet.

I spent the night visiting my Father and set off to Glasgow airport on a very foggy Glasgow Airport. Several flights were already delayed. I was very nervous as I checked in. I needn’t have worried my Heathrow flight was on time as the aircraft was already on the ground.

So far I had been traveling on my own but I had planned to meet up with old friend Ollie Bray. Ollie was attending the Global Forum as a judge and was traveling to Heathrow from Edinburgh. I was also going to meet 3 other people traveling from the UK that I had never met before. I knew I was going to get on well with everyone when we arranged to meet in the bar. Though I must admit that myself and Ollie were sitting on one side of a wall while the others sat the other side of the same wall and it took a while to realise what was happening…….. it did set a tone.

If you want to get involved with the Partners In Learning UK go to http://uk.partnersinlearningnetwork.com

Something new

An attempt at something new

vlog1 from Ian Stuart on Vimeo.

Would appreciate some constructive critism

What the Wiki!

Over the last 3 weeks I have been helping develop the beginnings of a Wiki based around the use of the Samsung Q1 UMPC in Education. This is growing quickly but it need more people involved even if its to ask about what different people are doing with the technology.

http://jamessamsung.wikispaces.com/

Technorati Tags: islay, education, samsung, UMPC, Q1, wiki

Google Sketchup of Islay House Square

We have been using Google Sketchup for quite a while now. Here is an example of some of the work.

 

Video: Islay House Square in Sketchup

The work is all the S1 pupils from one class. The pupils split themselves into groups. They decided on what they needed to do. They got the plans of the square and shared the work out amongst them. They worked out the sizes from the scale on the plans (1:400). They asked if they could go and visit to take photo's of the elevations. Transferred the images over onto the PC's and started to edit them-They wanted to remove the people and the cars they didn't want. They took the images and used them the create the textures.

6 of the year went to the Young Engineers Conference in Glasgow last Friday and while their they took the different models of the various buildings and placed them into a single model and created the animation. They then exported the animation as an AVI file and made the video in MovieMaker.

All this before they get a hold of the UMPC's!

What do you think?

PS I am giving presentation on this at SFL (SETT)

Technorati Tags: sketchup, islay, argyll, education scotland, education, google sketchup

Careful what you wish for .....

After a very busy week I arrived home (And I mean in the house after getting into school off the 7am ferry) at 8pm last night.
My wife has also been away since Wednesday so a pile of mail was behind the door. Amongst all the junk mail was the letter saying I had been accepted onto the SQH Course.................

Architecture Centre Network -ACN

From Blog Pics

At the end of this month I am off to London. Myself and Tassy Thomson from The Lighthouse. We have been asked to run a workshop for Architecture education staff from around the UK.

This is not the first time myself and Tassy have worked together. In fact we are old friends.

The invite came about from working on a workshop last summer in Finland courtesy of The Alvar Aalto Institute. Where we developed resources to allow young people to explore the built environment. I suggested using ICT (no surprise) to record what the young people experienced.

Therefore we have asked to give examples of cheap ways of using ICT to work with young people.

One thing I am keen to do is to get the pupils on Islay to get involved. I have ask 3 pupils to demonstrate the use of sketchup/Google earth via Video Conference and a bridge to the Internet.

Tassy has suggested getting the participants to come up with an educational project proposal using the skills introduced during the workshop and getting feed back from the pupils on Islay. I think this a great idea. It has several outcomes. The first and most obvious is that the participants will take away some real and practical but to me the idea of pupils on a Scottish island telling people in London how to do something and having their opinion listened too is a huge psychological switch. This will boost the confidence of the pupils and make the big city people think wider in how and who they work with.

The app's we will introduce are:

 

Sketchup 3d modeling app which can place buildings into

Google Earth

Picassa Cataloguing app but has some simple image editing

The Gimp full blown image editor – Shame about the name

Audacity – powerful sound editor

Freemind – mind mapping app

Photostory – simple app to create sound, image based video

Westpoint Bridge Design – engineering bridge solutions

Pre installed Windows

Moviemaker

Pre installed Apple

GarageBand

iMovie

and

Useful websites no particular order

http://www.handheldlearning.co.uk/ General use for using mobile ICT

http://www.createascape.org.uk/ Great to start off on how to

http://www.geolit.org/RockvilleCSI/ Cemetry Scene Investigation Pupils investigating their own community

http://www.enquiringminds.org.uk/ I love this way of working

http://www.spokenword.ac.uk/padova.php Picked this up at BarCampScotland

http://bridgecontest.usma.edu/ Bridge engineering site

http://www.teachers.tv/ Lots of uses to link to the curriculum

http://www.creativecommons.org.uk/ understanding creative commons

http://www.flickr.com/ of course!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki A great example of a wiki

http://www.wikispaces.com/ a space to create a starting wiki Maybe for the participants on the day

 

So what have I missed out on? Anything I should add in?

 

Technorati tags: islay, argyll, education scotland, architecture, education, ACN

A Curriculum for Excellence - ACfE

Today I was at the ACfE roadshow.

I love the concept of ACfE.

From Blog Pics

 

The idea of stating what you want your whole education system to do in such a clear way is inspirational. Its almost a mission statement for Scottish Education.

but.......

This has some major problems challenges before it will work.

The biggest challenge was exemplified within the group I worked with this morning.

They were a full range from a Pre 5 worker to  2 secondary Head Teachers. The pre 5 and primary colleague's were extremely thoughtful, enthusiastic, and positive. They looked at all the interesting and exciting approaches and activities they could do.

The secondary reaction, myself included, was ' how do we measure it?' or ' what about my subject?'

The material we looked at was the only material which has fully gone through the quality assurance process. It was 'Science', but was it the subject science? Parts of it would be covered by Geography, PE, Technology, RME, any number of places.

Their are 2 major problems that I see. One is cultural the other is practical.

The cultural one is Departmental protectionism. Each specialist will look from their area and say I should be teaching 'that' part in this 'way'. Another specialist will say that they need to teach it with another emphasis. Therefore no declutering just lots justifying of subjects within the framework.

The practical one is the way that secondary teachers are finally judged. The Exam results.

The SQA need to be fully behind this. We were told today that were. Maybe they are. I don't know.I wish I did and I wish I knew what they are thinking

 

Technorati tags: a curriculum for excelence, ACfE, education scotland, SQA

BarCampScotland - Chaos theory in action

Its taken me a few days to digest this and reflect on it.

Last weekend I was in Edinburgh for Scotland's first BarCamp.

Its a very interesting concept. Get lots of people together and let them go for it. Survival of the fittest. Loudest voices get heard. Please feel free to add other cliche's.

As a naturally reticent person (Yes I am! and stop laughing) its not a position I am fully comfortable with. Having said that I really enjoyed the events.

I say events because really their were 2 events running. One was a Techy one. This had lots of people speaking a fluent language. This is a language which I know the pigeon version of... I speak pigeon Geek. The other event was based around teaching & Learning. This firmly where I placed my talk. I should also apologise to DigitalKatie for over running my part of our shared slot.

The presentation seemed to go down well. Here are my slides

These 2 events did over lap at times. I witnessed this first of all with Robert Jones neatly switching the emphasis of his talk on Scotedublogs to the full language of Geek on Rails.

Another place I witnessed this crossover happen was in Tess Watson's presentation on Glow. Afterwards we got talk with some guy's (Sorry I can't locate them in the Wiki) who are developing access for youths in Glasgow. They instantly saw that Glow could provide that space for them.

One of the most interesting talk was by Dr. Hazel Hall. She was talking about the use of Wiki's in her course's. I enjoyed David Colarusso's idea of using YouTube to share physics films (Phylim!)

One I wish I had seen was Morna Findlay's. On how to interest pupils in Computer Science.

The biggest crossover was in the Bar (Surprise, Surprise).

Talking to lots of individual's and seeing how what we are all doing can crossover. I can see so may uses for Textensor in education.

BarCamp really is chaos in action. Frustrating and exhilarating.

Technorati tags: barcampscoland, education scotland, islay, edinburgh

Wireless Projector

From Blog Pics

I have been playing with a Panasonic Wireless Projector this week.

It is a great piece of equipment. It worked perfectly with our network. Once I realised how to configure it properly (It wasn't difficult, I was a bit slow)

The only problem I have is getting Google Earth to show up over the wireless but I am hoping to have an answer to that tomorrow. I suspect its an OpenGL setting I need to find.

The way the wireless projector works with the internet (I think) is that you use the controlling PC to call a page and that page is sent to the projectors IP Address. It works well.

One question I have at the moment is, if the projector is fixed in place thn can I save wireless bandwidth by using a projector which is hardwired through the CAT5 network?

I suspect, if such a projector exists, it would mean that any media called would be transferred via the hardwire making it much more efficient.

Does anyone have an suggestions, ideas, comments?

 

 

Technorati tags: islay, school, scotland, education scotland, projector, panasonic, school of ambition

Windswept and interesting

Tomorrow is the start of a new term.

Man, that was a quick term and then holiday! Though I am very keen to get back and into this term.

The reason for that is not just to get inside a different building having been stuck inside most of the holidays due to the awful weather but I have a new member of staff joining us for the next 6 months. Good luck Alaric.

This will free me up to get the next stage of the project setup and to provide direct classroom support to embed the technology.

The next stage over the next couple of months is to get network projectors and speaker systems into teaching areas, get servers setup and, of course, continue with the training and support for staff.

Wish us luck

Technorati tags: network projector, islay, glowscotland

When do changes stop being Pilots?

When I talk to people about our project they usually say "So, is this a pilot?" My answer is the same, "No its not a pilot, its a change to a way of working."
As Nicholas Negroponte says at TED, we have moved past pilots. So when does a pilot shift to being a change?
I feel that we have reached a pivot point and we are ready to shift our perspective from paper with some electronic based material to electronic based material with some paper.
The plans we are putting place are all their to support education and the curriculum. Nothing is particularly new or radical.Its using it as the main delivery medium.
As I usually say say at the end of my entries...... so what do you think?
I really mean this. Please come back with comments, criticisms, observations, points, questions
thanks
Ian

Technorati tags: glowscotland, school, education scotland, argyll, islay, umpc

The International views

I have been looking at resources and reports from around the world of schools using Tablet PC's or UMPC's.

A simple Google search produced so many reports that it has taken me a while to sift through them.

I am going to attempt to summerise the some of the ones which stood out to me.

The Vermont Slate

This is a small Vermont boarding school which is using Tablet PC's extensively. Mark Payton has been Blogging on the project since March '05.

I have found the questions, thoughts and solutions here to mirror my own and have even pre warned me about problems that I hadn't considered.

Eschool News

I have found this to be a bit of a Mine. Lots of digging produces some Diamonds, like Ray Kurzweil's interview

Tablet PC's in Singapore Schools

This is a full evaluation of tablet PC's in 2 Singapore schools.

Toshiba

Its no wonder that one of the big names in Tablet PC's has its say too

Do you have any more?

Technorati tags: Islay, scotland education, education, tablet PC, glowscotland

Conference XP

As Andrew Brown as said Collaboration is a vital component to a curriculum for excellence.
I think this is where the Apps that come with IWB's have had the biggest advantage. They have been exciting and active. Where presentations from PowerPoint have been scripted and lifeless. In the Campus Technology online Mag they talk about breathing the life back into Classroom Presentations. Its an excellent article.
The Client we have been assessing the use of is Conference XP. Though I am really excited by the whole Glow shared whteboard space.
The concept of everyone in a classroom having access to the same space at the same time is very exciting one and one of the main reasons for this project...... but not the only one.
Technorati tags: islay, glowscotland, classroom collaboration, argyll

Google Sketchup

 We have been developing the use of Google Sketchup.

I think this is a good way of introducing the concept 3D drawing.

We have been using Pro/Desktop for a few years. This a great application but has a sever learning curve to get you going. Even with the help of the CADinSchool site.

The pro/desktop application from PTC is a full CAD package. In schools this can be bought for £90 for 300 licence's. As you can see this alone makes it an interesting package but you can only get it at this price if you complete the training.

Do you think this a model for the future? Educational use at a reasonable price but only if you have invested the time in learning how to use the app properly.

Google Sketchup I saw as the way of introducing this professional level CAD work in S1/2 but the senior courses are using it too. Do I stop them? Do I direct them to use a much more complex application? So long as the results are what they design and not simplify their designs to make them easier to draw.

The framework to introduce Sketchup in S1 is to take a woodwork model they have already made and redraw it on the computer.

In S2 after drawing the school we are investigating old villages on Islay and starting to draw the buildings in Sketchup. The next part is to place these old villages on Google Earth. The pupils have responded extemely well. They are starting to realise how large the population of Islay was (15000 compared to 3500 now). 

Technorati tags: Google Sketchup, Islay, education scotland, CAD

Islay High School - A future?

This post has been transfered over from http://islayian.spaces.live.com/
Well I have finally admitted that I DO need to Blog about what is happening in Islay High School (I think its rapped Andrew)
As a School of Ambition and Excellence we are some way down the route of these 4 strands
1. Developing the leadership potential and capacity of the whole school, Staff and Pupils
2. Introducing Vocational Courses to the curriculum
3. Removing the age and stage restrictions from the certificated courses.
4. Developing the use of ICT to support the curriculum
I am heavily involved with the ICT strand so that is what I will be talking about mainly. Though, of course, the other strands will be brought in as well.
So what are we planning in the ICT Strand?
Every Teacher has a Tablet PC
A wireless network
Wireless Projectors in every teaching area
A presentation space in the Assembly Hall
A Media Server
A Class Server
Existing courses digitised
S1 'Benchmarked' for IC3 Giving them individual curriculum in S1/2
Once these are in place then give every pupil a UMPC computer
All of these are in Partnership with Microsoft and Dell. Maybe more partners in the future
We have just started down this route. I am sure we will have lots of challenges ahead.
I am hoping anyone who reads this will come forward with ideas and suggestions.
So what do you think?............
Ian

Technorati tags: glowscotland, school, education scotland, technology, umpc, microsoft, dell, handheld, islay