The SmartBoard Lessons podcast is more than its name may suggest. Originating from Canada, the podcast is not just a set of tutorials in using the board. It also focuses on how to integrate the SmartBoard and the latest web services into everyday teaching practice. Joan Badger and Ben Hazzard, the presenters of the podcast, have an uncanny knack of finding great web-links and working out how they can be used effectively on a whiteboard with students:

The goal of this podcast to share lesson ideas that use technology to engage students in learning with a focus on SMARTBoard Interactive Whiteboards.

Read more

Blackpool City Learning Centre’s “Video of the Moment” is a great parody of Tony Christie / Peter Kaye’s “Amarillo” with a very topical message:

• Blackpool CLC “Video of the Moment”

Just a few interesting things I’ve stumbled across recently .. .

Gliffy - online diagram creation

I came across Gliffy via Tom Barrett’s “ICT in my classroom” blog (which is really worth a visit, by the way - he’s doing some interesting things with blogs and wikis with his Y6 class).

Gliffy is an online tool for creating diagrams and charts, and includes a collection of standard shapes for creating flow-charts and floorplans. In a similar way to Google Docs and Spreadsheets (the leading online office web application), you can collaborate with other users online to create your chart. You can then publish your chart immediately to your own unique web address, then send the link to this to your colleagues or embed it easily inside your own website or blog. Gliffy also allows you to download your completed chart as a JPEG or PNG image file for insertion into documents on your PC.

Gliffy is free to use - check it out now.

• Gliffy

Read more

During the Autumn and Spring Terms, Paul Porter from Wolverhampton Local Authority and I have been visiting primary and secondary schools in the city to train teaching staff and students to create podcasts for publication on the Learning2Go Blog and Podcast. We’ve really enjoyed working with students during these sessions and have been very impressed by their enthusiasm and creativity in putting together great broadcasts.

I think we’ve also learned a lot ourselves about what makes a successful podcast. I therefore thought it might be useful to collect together in one place some ideas about what works and what doesn’t. I’m not going to focus here on the technological side of podcasting; instead, I want to consider some principles for planning and recording a good school podcast. Of course, all this is just a matter of opinion, but our experience so far indicates that certain ideas do work well.

I’ve included audio snippets from the Learning2Go podcasts to illustrate some of the ideas. To hear the full podcasts, visit learning2goblog.org.

1. Don’t go it alone

Read more

MissionMaker, Immersive Education’s amazing game-creation tool has been exercising my imagination a good deal over recent weeks. Last week we hosted and led a NAGTY event to give G&T students an introduction to the software. The feedback from the students was fantastic. In a single-day session, they implemented some really creative ideas in their games. During the Autumn Term, we are running an extended project with the software with a group from Our Lady and St. Chad’s RC School. I’ve also started work on a game in MissionMaker for use during our primary Adventure Game theme day; here’s the current version of the Maths part of the adventure:

• Maths Game (Right-click and “Save As”) - can only be opened from within MissionMaker.

(Later in the year, Immersive are planning to release a free player application which will allow anyone to play MissionMaker games, whether or not they have the game creation tool. You can find some examples of games created by students on this MissionMaker blog from Shropshire Local Authority).

All this means that I’ve been acquainting myself in detail with the joys (and occasional frustrations) of working with the software. MissionMaker is still a beta (development) product at the moment, but the core functionality is implemented beautifully. I have no doubt that the full production release will tidy up and enhance those features that are still a little rough-around-the-edges.

For those of you in schools and centres who have access to the current beta release, here’s a little trick I found!

Adding multiple triggers for an event

During our initial training at the CLC with the team from Immersive we were shown how to add multiple actions to a rule by opening an existing rule from the “My Game” menu and holding down the shift key while clicking on the arrow for another Action to associate it with the same trigger. This can save a huge amount of time and energy.

In the current beta version of MissionMaker there is no direct way to have multiple triggers for an action i.e. rules which say “the player must complete TASK A and TASK B to activate ACTION C”. This sort of rule-making allows the game-creator to implement far more complex and challenging puzzles. There is a scoring mechanism in MissionMaker that can accommodate some of this functionality - i.e. TASK A adds 100 to the score, TASK B adds 100 to the score and ACTION C occurs when the player has 200 points. The problem with this is that the player is completely aware of the progress they are making towards the goal; they see their score rise as the tasks are completed. This is a particular problem for a puzzle which involves positioning objects in trigger volumes, as the player can walk through the trigger volumes (holding the object in front of them) until they see their score increase.

I wondered if there was a work-around that would allow multiple triggers to be implemented in a manner that is completely hidden from the player. Read more