Well, I'm pleased to say that I am surplus to requirements at school now. It's pretty obvious if the last two days are anything to go by.
Yesterday one of our Teaching Assistants added a post to the website - but not just any post. This was a post containing video. The TA in question had previously recorded a video of the pupils during a science activity, and then transferred it to a laptop, put it into moviemaker, added music, titles and credits, then saved it as a .wmv file. Following this she then used a helpsheet I had produced and uploaded the video to our school Vimeo+ account, taking the embed code, and then created a new website article, added her text to it, then pasted in the embed code in the HTML view of the article to create her multimedia post.
Within 10 minutes this post was showing up in our shiny new iPhone app, and not long after a mobile video was also available through the app.
I was seriously impressed with what she had achieved.
And then today, I was out on a course all day. I kept using my iPhone during breaks to check for the latest comments to the website so that I could moderate and then publish them (Typepad have a great iPhone friendly feature that makes this a breeze), but as I made my final check just after the course finished I noticed a new article from another member of staff who had taken pupils artwork, put it on their visualiser and then transferred the images across to the laptop, created a post, added the images and published their work.
Brilliant!
But that still wasn't all because as I got home and switched on the computer, I found yet another article from another TA showing the work her maths group had been working on. This post not only contained images, but also an .mp3 of the children explaining their work. This TA had recorded them talking using a voice recorder, copied the audio across to audacity, then positioned the audio clips to play one after another before exporting as an .mp3 file and inserting it into the article.
Marvellous stuff!
So, three examples of staff grabbing the blogging bug and running with it. I'm not needed now. These pioneers can now encourage the remaining staff, and I'll be looking through the joblist. Ho - hum!
