I’ve just spent the last two days at the Drumossie Hotel, Inverness where I had the pleasure of talking with a considerable number of Gaelic teachers from around Scotland. There were delegates from Highland, Western Isles, Argyll & Bute, Glasgow, and East Dumbarton………..and probably some more.

I’ve been involved with various Gaelic teachers and advisors over the past few years due to the usefullness, in languages, of much of the software that we use in additional support needs. i.e. good multi-sensory, multimedia packages such as Textease and Clicker 5 which lend themselves to bookmaking, sentence construction, annotation, etc – and in any language you want. It’s so easy to record your own voice messages to these applications and teachers can use existing resources and make their own tailored to their own pupils.

I delivered 5 sessions on Textease – its use as a great interactive ‘blackboard’, how it can be used as the foundation and repository for ‘virtual topic boxes’ and its ease of use as a desktop publisher and presentation tool. Most teachers tell me that they had no idea the software could do all these things. A reflection of the prevelent notion that I often hear – that it’s a wee word processor for the infants!!!!!

My recommendation is that you take another look at this especially if you now have a digital projector in your classroom – you’ll not find a more flexible and easy-to-use package to prepare and deliver punchy teaching presentations.

The ’stuff’ I mentioned during the presentations can be found here.

Noel Jenkins’ personal website, juicy geography, is packed full of goodies for geography teachers and much of what is exemplified is inclusive by its very nature. While this is specifically aimed at pupils in the upper secondary area of schools there’s much for younger pupils too.

Thanks to the prolific Ollie Bray for flagging this up.

Definitely worth a look.

Thanks to Judy O’Connell for posting this video from James Paul Gee. Take 10 minutes out to listen to this vision of 21st century learning if you can.

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My wife, who is expecting our second child, passed her due date yesterday without incident so we must now be getting very close to the event!!! As a result, last week was spent in anticipation and I could only manage local visits. This week looks to be shaping up in much the same way. Apologies to those of you waiting for a visit!!

I’ve been using the time productively though. We’ve registered our other ‘new baby’ -  WriteOnline from Crick software and are readying ourselves to deliver some training in its use as well as getting it out to some pupils. This on-line word processor with speech output, prediction, and topic word-grid support allows a pupil to work at any Internet enabled computer. So working between home and school should become easy. There’s no software to install and what the pupil has at school will be exactly the same as they will see it at home.

Actually there is much more to this application than we first realised. There’s online storage space for files, free resources on many common curricular topics, and facilities to enable both pupil and teacher to comment on work in progress.

Can’t help feeing that this would sit beautifully inside GLOW to provide an excellent all-round writing support tool that would enhance inclusion on a number of levels. Must speak to Learning & Teaching Scotland about this!!!

We’ve also been looking very closely at Clicker 5. Although this has been around for quite some time now it’s only recently that schools in Highland have been getting it on refreshed equipment in any numbers. We will be delivering training in the use of this software very soon – watch out for news in the CPD calendar. Clicker 5 has a vast array of ready-made materials that are free to download but is also supported with add-on packs that cover early language development, ESL, common topics, as well as many inclusion features for pupils with additional support needs. It’s a real step up from the already excellent Clicker 4.

In the flurry of blogs that have kicked off the new term this little gem popped up through Ollie Bray’s excellent offerings from East Lothian. Go! Animate is a free, online animation package that is easy to use, has an extensive, and growing, set of resources and offers wonderful opportunities for students to tell their stories in  alternative ways. Have a look at the demo video here or go straight to the sign up page. Go on – Animate!!!!

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I have been very lazy this summer – in respect of the blog anyway!! I’ve been decorating, and tiling, and preparing for a new arrival in a couple of weeks time. Since I last posted, Mark Cavendish has gone on to record a record four stage wins in the Tour de France. We have women’s cycling and swimming gold medals as well as a swimming bronze and canoeing silver at the Olympics and we’re only a few days into the Chinese spectacular!!!!!

I have been at the computer though – looking at a few interesting online tools that I think schools will like and I’ll try to post on these over the coming weeks but there are busy times ahead.

The ATS Service Development Officer’s post is still to be appointed so August to October is going to be a bit of a whirl for me.

I have set up, for Highland teachers, who may wish to join with me and a few others, a professional/social networking site to enable folks to get a feel for the Web 2.0 technologies that are emerging and will, eventually, be available through Glow. It’s a small affair but I think may serve its purpose – I’ve certainly learned a lot through setting it up and keep finding new things each time I look around. There are places to share words, photographs, videos: you can even keep a blog withing the site!!!

This Highland Teachers network is open to a limited number of staff and can only be accessed by obtaining a password from me (alan.stewart@highland.gov.uk). I’m hopeful that anyone signing up for this will use it to gain experience by logging in regularly, commenting of other’s posts, and contribute ideas/resources themselves. It’s definitely a participation sport!!!!!!!

I recently set about creating a small scale, private social networking facility, using Ning, to offer Highland teachers the chance to communicate via a chat room, create interest groups, share photographs, video, and any other useful teaching resources. The term proved to be very busy and there was little time to launch this until now.

This type of facility is similar to some of the tools that Glow will offer when it eventually reaches Highland schools. I am very much of the opinion that we need to start ’skilling’ ourselves up in this area now rather than waiting for the Glow versions of these tools to become available. I have found quite a few tools that we might well use now in preparation for when our candle is eventually lit – you’ll have to sign up though to find out what these are!!!!

Given that a network of this nature requires people to, first of all, populate it and then continue to engage with it, I do hope that a number of you will join me in this experimental journey of discovery. We’ll only know how well it works and how useful it might be to us by giving it a go.

To keep the site private I have set it up in such a way that entry is by invitation only. That means that you’ll have to email me (alan.stewart@highland.gov.uk) for login details. At present I am the only person with the administrative permissions to invite new members but it would be good if one or two other administrators/moderators could be identified to ensure better speed of response and variety of input. In the meantime I will restrict membership to Highland teachers and known friends of the education department who may have useful input to the experiment.

There are a few Google adds down the side of the site – if this takes off I’ll pay the small fee to have these removed.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Andrew Brown, newly appointed Glow Development Manager for Learning & Teaching Scotland, reports on updates to the GlowScotland website. Andrew is a very enthusiastic individual whose contribution to Glow is already significant. I’m certain that many more will benefit from his strong commitment to the project and his new role within Glow.

The updated site aims to keep everyone fully informed about all aspects of Glow as it rolls out across Scotland. As you can see from the page listings below it’s possible to get information about local as well as national activity. It’s also now possible to subscribe to the GlowScotland website via an RSS feed.

There are links to news updates posted an the glowscotland blog as well as access to training materials and information about how to prepare for Glow. A very useful article was posted today giving access to Pathway Brochures to help make the most of your visit to the Scottish Learning Festival in September – an event Head Teachers ought to attend if at all possible. Booking information can be found here.

Exactly 20 years ago this month I was preparing to write the third or fourth TMA (Tutor Marked Assignment) of my Arts Foundation Course (A102) and preparing to attend my first Open University Summer School. My experiences over the following 6 years were great – 40+ TMAs, 3 Summer Schools (Stirling & York twice) loads of friends and 6 exams!!!

I remember being fastidious in my recording of the course videos and became adept at setting up the technology to record the programmes that were typically broadcast at 2.30 am!!!! It was the radio broadcasts, however, that really caused me the problems – it was much more difficult to set up tapes to automatically record in the early hours of the morning.

All of these difficulties – and memories of missed broadcasts – flooded back to me as I read about the Open University’s decision to make course materials available on iTunes U. No more piles of videos, no more missed broadcasts, no more writing up of sticky labels………oh joy.

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My experiences with the OU led me into new career paths that I’d never have considered had I not undertaken the studies which effectively changed the course of my life.

I’m seriously thinking of going back to look at today’s updated versions of the courses I studied – perhaps I’ll even sign up formally for a course or two in this new era of anytime, anywhere access to audio and video resources for learning.

I just loved Theo Kuechel’s blog post with this Retro MySpace picture and, of course, what he draws from it! It conjured up memories from my own schooldays when jotter covers were decorated with names and logos of favourite bands, girls, comments and, well………….doodles!!

……a notebook, made by Jill when she was 18, reveals most of the attributes of a MySpace, Facebook or Bebo page a youngster might create nowadays. Read the notes (do click here) Jill adds to the image on its Flickr page. My reason for choosing this image is that it establishes a connection between past and present that creates a context for those using digital media today……

Image credit Jill

Read Theo’s full post here and drop by to visit the sketch books and ideas of great innovators from the past