RichardRadio

I’ve been catching up on some Rocketboom that are stacked up on my hard drive. The Nov 30 2006 show featured Phil Torrone from Make showing ideas for open source gifts.

I’m sure some of our Y9′s could use these ideas for their Mini Enterprise this summer. I for one would like one of these Minty Boost Kits to charge my iPod on the road. But, would I rather buy the kit or a ready made one?

So I thankfully made it through the first term. Generally I’ve found it easier since half term apart from the last week and a half before Christmas during which the kids were a bit loopy.

The last day I was meant to keep the kids on curriculum, but I do admit to bending it a little to involve creating animated Christmas cards. The one I’ve enlosed here is from Sasha, who generally doesn’t come to my lessons and when she does, she doesn’t do much ICT (least not databases and spreadsheets). Just goes to show… I thought that this was the best of the animations. Well done Sasha!

How do I harness this talent? And how do I keep her on side? We had a lovely lesson as kids rushed to save their work into a shared folder so I could show it to the whole class on the projector.

I’m back in Sheffield, eating, reading and sleeping and enjoying the company of my family. Best wishes to everyone.
xxR

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Animation created screen printing from Sasha’s original powerpoint into the GIMP and using the native gif animation (see this tutorial )

Our 2006 Y9 Control UoW Used Flowol to program sequences of lights for the ‘Party in the Park’ mimic [shown] for a half term (6+ lessons). Y9s are on a carousel with drama (swapping each half term) so I taught this unit twice.

The lights provide a really ‘loose’ or open end task which requires both creativity and programming expertise. Anyone can get the lights to flash, but developing routines involves dreaming up some combinations and then learning the programming techniques. The first time I taught it the kids got off to a flying start and were exited by the task, but for most for those the lesson was really dragging after about no. 4, because they didn’t have the structured thinking necessary to understand what they were trying to do.

I felt that the UoW was weak in defining specific tasks for the kids to acheive which especially impacted the lower ability kids. So, the second time around, I spent time developing their ‘sequences vocabulary’ introducing words to describe sequences such as Fill, Fill LtoR, Fill RtoL, Splash (ie. Fill from centre), Travel, bounce etc. The purpose of this was to firstly get the kids to recognise a sequence and thus give them a specific task for them to acheive.

Add a new Introductory Mimic?
Even so, some just didn’t manage to regognise even basic sequences. For this reason I think we should use a different mimic to build up the skills. eg. Control a crane so it can pick up a brick and put it in a box. In such a sequence the child is either successfull or not and they know what to aim for. When they have aceived this then they can go onto the creative artistic context.

Y9 Modules are meant to be integrated ie. kids use a number of applications to complete a project. Out UoW is very Flowol based and the only other application used it Word, to gather evidence. To encourage assessment of the quality of the show rather than just the programming skills it would be much better to use Screencasting (MS Media Encoder) to capture evidence of the quality of their show. This would also be more ‘integrated’.

NQT support
Lastly, as an NQT teaching this Unit, it was very difficult to build up skills as I didn’t have a copy of the software to practice with at home. A laptop or a disk (with the right mimic) would have helped immensely and allowed me to develop more resources.

Resources
In a similar vein, there were very few worksheets that the kids could use to work independently, and some of those actually taught poor programming methods – eg. creating 2 switches where 1 would suffice.

Of course the most important thing would be to actually have a party and get a light box just like the mimic that could be controlled by Flowol.

Would be great to hear of other colleagues experiences

Keyword: KS3

My 15 year old Car (Rover 218 Turbo Diesal) died last week and I needed a new one quick, so I went for an old cheap one. A 1996 Fiesta for £400 that I hope will get me through to the summer. After alot of thinking with no obvious choice I just went for the first small car that I came across locally.

I’m pretty happy about it. The dead car was a diesel so the Fiesta seems really quick off the mark, it cost just less than £30 to fill it with fuel rather than just less than £40. But it is on 2 really important criteria that it made me smile. The seats have good lumber support (even after 10 years use) and the radio is controllable which after 3 years of listening to nothing but Radio 5 in the old car is like heaven. The bonus of having a cassette means my iPod can be easily plugged in too – if it had a more modern CD player I’d have to mess about with a iTrip type device which I never found very satisfactory.

I decided on a smaller car for economy and parking. And in the last 3 days I’ve been able to park outside the house almost all the time, cos there was a little tight spot that I found quite easy to get into but no one else did.

Ideally I’m thinking about a small VW (Polo) or maybe Fiat Punto, but there are so many short hatches around that are higher rather than low slung. And thats the point for parking. I wouldn’t mind going for an old 80s quality European or Japanese car. But they are slung low.

I’ve just written a little Moodle module to serve as a half way house towards student’s creating their own Eportfolios.

Similarities to Eportfolios
- No printing on paper
- get used to making PDFs

Differences to Eportfolios
- Work is structured for them the deliverables are named.
- I know when they have submitted the work and can set a deadline

for full image of the module:
www.richardradio.com/images/moodle_AIDA_DB.jpg

Also see
http://richardradio.com/wordpress/2006/11/06/moodle-for-dida/