carol.robertson

We in Rothesay Academy have been waiting for the signal to quickly pack up all our belongings and move to our new school over the Christmas holidays.  I’ve been living in trepidation, wondering how it’s all going to pan out.  There are 200+ computers to be moved in the space of about 6 days.  As a computing teacher I know how easily that can be done! 

Yesterday the agony of waiting was over, we’re not moving… yet!  Relieved, we can all turn our attention to teaching and learning again, right up to the holidays.  However, mother nature had different ideas.  Today my classroom took what was probably the worst beating so far in about 4 weeks of dreadful weather.  With the result I had to move computers after all to avoid the water streaming in around the windows.

After having spent most of my evening last night trying to post my blog… (Yes I am having difficulty with this site.  When I click Save, it publishes several different copies of my blog, which I then have to delete) I came across this great piece of free, yes free software.  Paint.NET.  It apparently is Windows replacement for Paint but is very similar to Photoshop.  Ideal for the classroom.  You have to have Microsoft .NET framework v2.0 installed for it to run, but if you don’t, when you attempt to install Paint.NET it cleverly points you to the correct place to find the .NET fx v2.0. 

Hi all.  I’ve recovered at last from a sick laptop and am back in the social network, so to speak.  Boy it took me ages to remember the address for the blog, then the username and then the password, desperate.  There must be a better way of identifying yourself to the various blogs, websites and other places we constantly visit.  Then I watched ‘The Gadget Show’.  I’m completely hooked on this show.  Last night they showed a neat fingerprint scanner which you plug into your laptop at home and when you want to log in to a site you simply swipe your finger.  FAB.  Cost less than £20.  However, (isn’t there always a however) the software needed to use this simply gadget is yet to become widely available. 

I wait with baited breath…

On Wednesday and Thursday I attended SETT as a new Glow Mentor.  I attended a few seminars and a couple of Keynotes although sadly I missed Dr Edward de Bono’s Keynote speech.  Hopefully I’ll catch up on the LTS site though. 
 

My first seminar was cancelled – ICT: Inspiring Creative Teaching and Learning for Pupils of all Abilities – which meant I had to jump into the next available one which happened to be Frank Pignatelli – New Approaches to Engaging Learners.  He described the need for a supportive environment with improved access for learners which stimulates demand.
 

BBC Jam was next.  I enjoyed this seminar which gave a clear insight into some of the super resources available on BBC Jam and I have since forwarded my thoughts on this to the Technical department to try.
 

I went from there to the Teachmeet06 led by Ewan MacIntosh, where emerging technologies enthusiasts joined for a free glass of wine, courtesy of Stormhoek.  There were live demos of podcasting, online video editing and other stuff.  See Ewan’s blog.
 

Infants Can Communicate by Morag MacDonald and Marlyn Moffat from Argyll and Bute was inspirational.  You can read all about it on their Interactive Chatting Teddies (ICT) blog.
 

We then met for the Glow Mentor Launch led by Marie Dougan.  Then off to the Crowne Plaza for dinner and dance. 
 

On Thursday the day started by meeting with the A&B Mentor team where we had a chance to formally meet with the new Mentors.
 

From there I went to Ewan MacIntosh’s Web 2.0 (or what was web 1.0?) who described how emerging technologies can support and enhance our pupils learning.  He mentioned wikis, blogs, flickr, iPods, mobiles etc.  Inspirational.
 

Turning Good Teachers into Great Leaders by Teri Dozier was the next keynote I attended.  Wonderful speaker with great ideas for mentors as teacher leaders.
 

Most of the rest of the time I spent in the Assessment for Learning Village and the exhibition hall.  There were a great many new and exciting products to see, books to order and pens, post-its and mouse pads to appropriate.

Finally mangaged to get this posted.  Having trouble logging in. 

Started the week with the dreaded news that ‘nothing’ was working.  No E-mail, no internet, no Click and Go registration, nada.  Great news if you have an S1 please take coming in to your classroom period 1, because it’s easier to let them surf and e-mail than the English teacher having to find work for them.  “Drawing anyone!”  Finally we got the nod and everyone was able to go online.  I noticed then that the little ‘digital natives’ for want of a better word had managed to get around the filter into Bebo which has been blocked authority-wide due to the recent national and more local news.  I read Alan November’s site and others, and I have to agree with them and Andrew Brown, that children should be taught responsible surfing and ‘netiquette’ skills rather than blanket  blocking and I’m sure that this fits into our Curriculum for Excellence.  Are we not aiming for ‘responsible citizens’, ‘confident individuals’?

Tomorrow I’m off to an in-service day which goes under the grand title of Macromedia Breeze Management.  I am looking forward to this because it gives me the chance to meet up with other like-minded people and to begin to develop new materials with them which can be used by us all and hopefully our colleagues in the classroom.  More on Breeze after the course. 

At the end of the day I visited a local primary school to help out with the administering of a 5-14 package which we have installed throughout all the feeder primaries and the secondary on the Island (Bute).  The package is an English based course called Smart Learning.  The meeting went well and I came away feeling that we had accomplished a very good start to the learning of ICT for all the pupils in the Primary.  This will, of course, have a knock on effect for us in the Secondary as S1 pupils will have increasing ICT skills as the years go on. 

When I got home I realised all the files I had prepared during the day to copy onto my USB pen for the Breeze course were in school on my laptop.  Fortunately I had, believe it or not, last week, taken a backup of all my school files and copied them to my home computer.  How Smart is that? 

I wonder though, how many of us do take backups.  It’s something I preach about constantly to my pupils and until lately never really bothered about myself.  Once bitten though… (my laptop crashed) …it’s definitely worth taking the time to do this regularly.

This week I have spent all my non-contact time sorting out school networking problems.  I have set up new users, had users accounts either disabled or enabled, added (keyed in every name) the whole of S1 to our server, so that they can actually access the file store and sorted out access to our S1/2 package for all users (keyed them all in again).  In the interim I had to de-stress one teacher who was suicidal because ‘nothing was working’, which turned out to be a missing Word shortcut and calm another frantic teacher whose whole departmental folder had gone missing.  I then had to locate said folder on the server and put it where it should be. One wonders how these things happen in the first place.  On a lighter note, however, I showed a colleague how to save her e-mail from Outlook Web Access which apparently she’d been trying to do for 2 years.  Just didn’t ask the right person…

IE7RC1?  Is this double Dutch to anyone else?  This evening I successfully downloaded IE7RC1.  I believe that A&B schools are going IE7 very soon so I thought I’d better have a go.  I took the tour and set up my options.  Looks very slick so far.  I have finally got to grips with RSS feeds (so much for ‘Really Simple’) and have now added all the Mentors blogs to the very-easy-to-subscribe-to Feeds options in the favourites panel.  I now need to wait until somebody updates their blog to see if it works.  I don’t know where I’m going to find the time to read them all though. 

Having started out in the blogging arena as a cynic I now find myself with a third blog.   Isn’t technology marvellous.  I am a computing teacher of a good number of years and have seen the demise of BBC’s, Amstrads, Acorns etc. only to be replaced with the next best thing.  There is a huge variation in the use of technology and the availability of and access to technology in schools and the same can be said for blogs. In such a short time since their advent there seems to be a great deal of variance between the different blogging sites.  New options, new tools, new ways of keeping up – if you can.  And once again it’s up to us technologists to attempt to do just that and help others to do the same.  Looking forward to the new challenge already. 

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