Present about PBwiki and upgrade your educational wiki for free

I’m going to do a presentation about pbwiki to the rest of staff at school and the nice people at pbwiki provide a presenter pack for you to use.  Not only that, they will give you 3 Gold upgrades for free – one for you and two for you to give away.  Sounds like a good deal to me….  instructions below.

Thanks for requesting a PBwiki Presenter Pack!

We didn’t expect to get such a huge response from our email yesterday, so when we saw the flood of hundreds and hundreds of emails coming in, we almost fainted. Fortunately, we just set up a better system to handle lots and lots of PBwiki Presenter Pack requests.

To get your Presenter Pack, please do us a favor and re-enter your information here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=222013580776
We’ll get the goodies to you right away.

Thanks,

David, Ramit, Nathan, Emily, Brian, and Darren
Your PBwiki Presenter Packified Team

Radio Adverts part 2

I’m continuing to play with splashcast and I think it could be a good vehicle for publishing pupil’s work. I have now added the year 9s radio adverts for their fictitious business. You can have a listen here or click on Mr C’s Splashcast page in the top right hand corner.

Broadcast SHR

In ICT club we spent about three weeks putting together a podcast of one of the weekly notice sheets.  The aim is to produce more podcasts on various topics which we will host on BroadcastSHR but we may have to wait until the exam silly season is over….

WordPress hidden toolbar

For wordpress bloggers – if you want more control when formatting the text in your posts then try pressing alt-v (ctrl-v on the mac) and another set of icons appear…

Radio Adverts

Year 9’s are focusing on an imaginary business this year.  They have just completed a radio advert for the business using Audacity

Have a listen – you can find their latest blog posts containing the ads on the right hand side.

TED talks

I think Steve first put me on to some of the videos available from TED (Technology Entertainment and Design Conference) talks.  I really enjoyed Sir Ken Robinson’s talk and now thanks to this TED splashcast channel you can choose who you want to listen to (it will continue to be updated throughout the year).  To select a different speaker (a different show) move your mouse over the player to activate the control and then click on guide.  I’ve only seen Sir Ken’s talk on creativity and I would highly recommend it, I’m also going to have a listen to Rick Warren.  Add a comment if you come across one you would recommend.

My first splashcast…

splashcast

teach-ict videos

I’ve used teach-ict.com a lot, especially for their starter activities.  Now they have added software video tutorials which cover lots of basic and not so basic skills.  I used them recently in a year 7 lesson as a starter, I pointed the class to the excel section and told them they had 5 minutes to learn two new things about excel.  After the five minutes were up they were very enthusiastic about sharing what they had discovered – I didn’t teach them anything….

Peer evaluation using MS Access

In an attempt to record some peer evaluation of their classmates webpages, I put together this database.  Pupils were commenting on the work of a group who developed a section of a website rather than commenting on the work of an individual.

It can be shared on a network –  it uses a form to collect data and a report to collate responses.  With a little Access knowledge you could probably adapt it to suit any assessment situation.

OCR Nationals in ICT – Resources

ICT-Tutor.com 

I came across this site recently and I’m sure it would be very useful for anyone thinking about delivering the OCR Nationals in ICT.  It is quite sophisticated, free and the generous ICT people at Sandfields Comprehensive school are more than happy for anyone to use it!  Here is the first paragraph on the home page;

Why we are here

ICT-Tutor is designed specifically for the parents and pupils of Sandfields Comprehensive School, studying a range of qualifications. However, anyone studying the same qualifications is more than welcome to use any of the material on this site. As a new site, we have decided to concentrate on providing material for the OCR Nationals in ICT qualification first. This site is a school resource, it is not produced, endorsed or recommended by OCR or any other examining body.