Friday, February 20, 2009

TeachMeet Borders: Part II

Stuart Meldrum talked about a pupil who broke a collar bone and couldn't write or do the normal work in the technology classroom. SO he planned on the computer and then presented his results on Animoto.

Theo talked about Flickr Commons. Showed some of the Library of congress photos that was added to Flickr. Showed how people added important information to the library photos. National Gallery of Scotland also have added stuff and showed how you can take teh images into Picnik and overlaid old photo of Edinburgh with new image from same place. Used transparency control to fade between the two images. Gave an impassioned plea for more things to be made available through Creative Commons Licences. Also talked about the collaborative work and gave the TeachMeet Borders Spotify list as an example.

David Gilmour then talked about the East Lothian experiment with NetBooks. His argument was the hardware is now less important than the network. Some information on One Net Book Per Child blog. They wanted somewhere to store things online and so used Google Apps but used an education bit of it. Makes it easy for schools/university to create collaborative areas for people to share documents.

Andy McSwan did an excellent nano presentation on the Cool Wall in his Computing class. This is a stunningly simple idea but a brilliant way to help classes consider aspcts of your subject. Just set up a Cool Wall and the pupils will start scanning the press and the web for examples - enjoying the hunt but learning about the topic in the process.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for blogging this David. The system I showed was Google Apps Education Edition (http://tinyurl.com/yuqsd9). The usual arrangement is for a school, college or university to sign up and create a Google Apps installation for an individual site. In our case, though, we've set it up using the edubuzz.org domain (http://docs.edubuzz.org) because we don't want the boundaries of the individual schools to get in the way of collaboration between staff and students.
The blogs covering the netbook project are:
http://edubuzz.org/blogs/kingmeadow
http://edubuzz.org/blogs/onenetbookperchild
- and my one.

David said...

Thanks for the extra info David. Google Apps for Education looks interesting. I will need to investigate further.

Anonymous said...

You forgot the guy who presented about iRiddles.....

David said...

Hello Iain

He was rubbish... but I might do a special post about iRiddles tomorrow. :-)