| Digital - teacher | Education in a technological world

BBC and Flickr

Here's a telling comment about Flickr. I see that the BBC Autumnwatch programme, has decided that it's associated website should use a Flickr group for people around the UK to send in their autumn photos. Previously all submitted photos to the BBC have been held on their own servers.
Flickr must have been shown to the top bosses who liked the look of it!
I do however notice that the video submissions feature is being stored on the BBC servers still.

BBC Off By Heart competition

Straight from the BBC website;

"The BBC wants primary school pupils to engage with learning and reciting poetry. Every primary school in the UK can enter a child aged 7 - 11 to compete for the title of UK Poetry Recital Champion, and the chance to represent their school and region in what will be a fantastic BBC competition, shown on BBC TV in spring 2009.

You can select a child who has won a past competition or you could find a fresh school champion by holding a poetry recital competition as a class, in an after-school club, or even as a whole school. Exciting new resources, including an inspirational collection of poems to choose from and tips on how to include poetry in your lessons, are available - just click on the Teachers Notes link on the right.

There is also a selection of video recitals featuring famous faces from TV, poetry experts and actors reciting poems from the shortlist. Take a look and get inspired.

All you need to do is encourage each child to select one of the poems to learn by heart and recite it in front of their peers - as part of a school assembly or a lesson - whatever works for you.

Then, complete the registration form with your details indicating that you'd like a child from your school to take part NO LATER THAN 19TH DECEMBER 2008.

The child you've chosen will go on to attend a BBC poetry workshop in Jan/Feb 09. They'll take place in lots of locations around the country and there may be one near your school.

These exciting poetry workshops will also include a solo poetry recitation in front of a panel of judges to find our 12 UK finalists. The 12 pupils representing each region will then be invited to the grand finale, filmed for BBC TV, to compete for the title of UK Poetry Recital Champion.

If you have any queries please contact us at offbyheart@bbc.co.uk"

Two [old] widgets

We've made a few changes during an autumn clean of the site, and we thought we'd highlight two features that have been on the site for a long time, but never publicised.

The first is now shown at the top left of the navigation bar above.  'Shop' takes you to a page on the site of recommended items from Amazon. We've selected educational titles for adults, books for children, as well as games, DVDs and music. Hopefully there will be something listed that grabs your attention.

The second is now shown at the top right of the navigation bar above. 'Get Mobile' takes you to Mippin. A web based application that converts the Digital-teacher website into mobile friendly pages. It's a great service that is free to use. The only cost is the data cost that your service provider will charge.

We live and learn

So, I was trying to be clever the other day and redesigning my own website using the Typepad blogging platform. The site design was straight forward enough. It only took around 20 minutes to get everything as I wanted it, create some graphics and load them all.
The next part was where the problems began...

The domain name I use is hosted by 1and1.co.uk but the website design and content is hosted by Typepad.com. This isn't a problem, I can simply domain map the typepad address into the 1and1 settings and voila - you type in one address and actually get sent to another without even knowing it.

What I hadn't expected though was as soon I set up the transfer, and it became active it would render all my email addresses at the said domain name useless!!

Frantic phone calls to my web hosts revealed that although I was only changing a CNAME record to point a web address elsewhere, it would mean that the MX records would be altered. The problem with those is that I cannot alter them. So, everything has gone back to as it was until I can find a way around this problem...

Kids Video

Here's a fun thing that I'm trying out with the kids at school. I've asked some of them to use a video camera to record some of the activities that they have been involved in (they've chosen so far to record themselves as they checked traffic speeds outside as well as their cycling safety lessons). We took the video and added them to Moviemaker, before then watching the (s0 far silent) video and using a voice recorder to add a commentary, which we then dropped into the video.
Along with a title and end graphic that I had prepared - must find an easy free online graphics programme that they can use - they produced a simple news report.

This video was dropped into the website videos folder on the school network, and then once at home uploaded to google video, and embedded onto the school website (can't be done in school because our local authority filtering service blocks video). On top of that it was added to our Vodcast feed, and iTunes now shows it along with our other video productions.

The kids loved the simplicity of it all, and I'm now considering a group that works on a longer film. Either stop motion animated, or with them acting something out.

Wall Poster maker

Came across a really great free website recently that lets you create wall sized posters from your photographs. I can see this being used in the classroom to print out a large scale map in geography, used as a backdrop for a concert, or maybe used in a hall as an eye catching "feature wall".

The actual process is incredibly simple - upload the photo, decide how many "sheets" wide you want it to appear, and then download the pdf file that is created. Just print out and stick together. You can then crop the images to create a neat no join visible poster, or keep the edging and create a mosaic effect.

To iTune or not to

I read today that apple are considering whether or not to close their iTunes service. I was slightly surprised to find that out, given that iTunes has around an 85% share of the online music market.
Why would apple make such a statement? It seems that the amount of royalties is about to change - and if the record companies don't pay the extra, then it comes down to apple or the consumer. Apple say they won't raise prices, or absorb the extra cost either.

So, come tomorrow I might have a complete archive of all my old music, but nothing new to add to it...

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Going digital

This term at school we've been making good use of the Sherston "Channels" website. For our current history topic we are learning about the Tudors, and our lessons so far have been based on Henry VIII, Catholic Vs Protestant, Rich and Poor, and Country Vs Town living.
The children are getting better at completing a task within the lesson, and even better they are now starting to go home, log into the service in their house and either add more to their work and start a second task.

We'll have them all working remotely from home soon. And then they won't need a teacher. And then I'll be out of a job...

As Fagin once said in "Oliver"; I think I'd better think it out again!!