Media Coverage

I knew one day I'd get my 15 minutes of fame. I always imagined my big break would have been through a rather more fashionable publication than the 'times educational suppliment'. Ho hum. At least the second years seemed to enjoy the experience.

Narnia podcast

It looks like I've found a suitable and hopefully interesting site for my French class. It's been difficult to find stuff that fits in with the units we're working on in class and I'm reluctant to just make an add-on project as we're fast-tracking this class through Standard Grade a year early and can't afford the time.

Luckily we're just finishing a unit on tv and films, so for homework this week they were to visit a French site on the new Narnia movie and download the podcast available there. We'll see how they get on.

Instead of getting 'the dog ate my homework' excuses now I'm getting 'my computer is broken'.

They've just finished writing and recording their own movie reviews onto their ipods. I'd like to create some podcasts now, but I'm not sure how to proceed. I'm hoping a fewer of the keener pupils will figure it out for me!

From Stephen Rafferty

Stephen Rafferty is a whizz kid teacher who expands the use of ICT in education almost daily....but he hasn't quite worked out how to blog yet :-) Here are some comments from Stephen...

Using IPod every day.
Re-discovered/discovered music.
Started off a bit sad wearing my earphones everywhere. Now have confidence in “sharing” my music.
Very impressed at what Ipodogogy promised.
Have not quite realised the potential of my IPod yet.
I am happy with viewing, listening and sharing photos and music. I now realise that there’s more to I’Tunes than meets the eye. I’m beginning to get a handle on this but Podcasting…?

Music – excellent.
Photo’s and slide shows – excellent.
Calendars – great to be able to view calendars on the go. Discovered more features in ICal. I now make much better use of my notes for events and “to do” items. Excellent for inserting meeting agenda and minutes.

At our first meeting I raised the question of why IPods could not play video. Then, low and behold, Apple release a new IPod with video. Now that would be useful in my subject.

Our mikes came today – suddenly I see potential.
Recorded a meeting tonight and will send, as minutes, to the members of our team.

I just wish I had more time to get my head round podcasting.


So…
Has it changed my life?
Yes
Has it changed my teaching?
Not yet!
Could it?
I think so.

iPods in the History classroom

Going Live

Have just finished a small narritive on the first mov of Debussy's orchestral tone poem 'la mer'. It has been mixed down from cubase sx to itunes and then into studywiz for the kids to import into their ipods. Tried to drop some text into the 'lyrics' section of the file... the musical concepts used etc but had a bit of difficulty there. Going to persevere though as it would be nice if the kids could see those words appear as they listen to the music and my narrative.
Working closely with the art department as they pursue 'visual' impressionism and the work of Monet.

David R.

Slacker

I feel like a bit of a slacker on the ipod front, so I thought I'd look at some podcasts. I found a French grammar one that tries using relaxation techniques to teach verbs, but it was so dull that the only thing I got out of it was relaxation. I also found the Animal Farm in French... not sure I can use that with my S2s. What I did find as I browsed around the existing podcasts is that a lot of it is really inappropriate for pupils - lots of swearing, etc. So I guess I'd better create something of my own. I'm thinking of getting our French language assistant to record Le petit prince chapter by chapter for my Higher class. Anyone have any great cross-curricular ideas to include me in?

Sharing - "blink"

Tried sharing some Mathematical mp3 files using

Edit > Preferences > Sharing

on iTunes. Worked well over the school's network even saw some interesting stuff on other shared folders.

But there is this one called "blink" no idea whos it is and no idea what is on it.

Can anybody shed any light on it

Also if I can share stuff over the school network it must be possible for students to do it. How are we going to monitor that?

Few Ideas for Maths

Loaded up a few albums onto the ipod.

Played some Beethoven to my Int2 class to see if it would make them work better. When they saw my playlist they just wanted Queen to be played.

When I was teaching my S4 Credit class a bit about proportion between Voltage and Current I played them Danger! High Voltage by Electric Six - they all thought I was a nutter.

Thought of a few ideas for using ipods in maths. Click here to enlarge

Yvonnes ipod

Not having access to a computer or the internet at home has been a bit of a problem! However my whizz kid nephew in Carrickfergus just loved the i pod[his is a lot older] and was extremely helpful over the holiday week.Basically I wanted to download some world war 2 materials-peoples" memories of evacuation,rationing etc. and maybe some songs-sing along with Vera_We'll meet again.....Difficult to get hold of sound archives-Adele helped me with this I've now got quite a few from a project by Enfield Museum and they're really interesting to listen to-which is just as well as I spent a lot of time in A and E and hospitals that week and it was the only thing on my I pod!I I'm interested in maybe recording interviews with folk who were children in the war and the kids could make questionnaires and do interviews Have finally also started to self indulge and got lots of my favourite music on to the Ipod.Quality of sound is fantastic! Trouble is I just spend hours listening and nothing gets done!Y