A new venture
I haven’t posted for a short while, I’ve been busy with a writing job that’s taking a little longer than I expected (Adobe Captivate is fun but time consuming). Normal service will be resumed soon!
I just wanted to mention a new blog I’ve set up. It’s not going to replace this one, just run parallel to it. In addition to my whiteboard training I am also a Science tutor for a teacher-training programme with a group of 20 PGCE trainee primary teachers. I wanted to set up something I could direct them to for help and information about some of the things that come up in the lectures, and also to highlight useful websites. We’re nearly at the end of this academic year, but the plan is to get it established for next year’s cohort.
If you are a primary teacher with an interest in Science then you might also find this blog interesting. You can find it at www.scittscience.co.uk
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Science IWB training course
Just a quick blog post to say there are still places available on my IWB in Science course for Lighthouse in London on 17th June (flyer)
Contact Lighthouse if you want any more information about this course or the other courses later in the year.
I’ll be delivering a day in Glasgow in November for another provider. I’ll hopefully be able to post the details on here in the near future.
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TeachMeet
Well I went to TeachMeet on Monday and had a great time. I met up with a few people I’ve met through Twitter, and one or two ex-colleagues too.
You can see a run-down of what happened on the TeachMeet wiki, but here are some of the things that I wanted to share:
The Visualiser Forum Launched, drawing upon experience in Havering Schools
Andy Black shows off some good robust digital camcorders,
www.gogivers.org – a site for primary schools with lots of useful FREE webtools: Timeline, Decision Tree World Viewer, Mindmapping etc.
WhatWorksWell - a website for sharing improvement in learning. Any teacher or education professional can publish their own case studies using the template provided. Launched end Nov – over 60 case studies up there already.
The Coming of Age book was mentioned by Terry Freedman.
Looking forward to future Teachmeets, I hope to be able to contribute something next time.
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Wiimote Whiteboard Adventures
Inspired by Doug Belshaw’s post over here, I was finally inspired to try and build my own wii IWB system.
I’m not the most practical person (I’m still very proud of my D+ in woodwork at school) and I have never soldered anything in my life. But undaunted by this I trecked off my local Maplins electronic store and bought a few bits and pieces, as outlined by Doug.
Namely
An infra red LED
A microswitch
An AAA battery holder
some wire
Soldering iron and wire
A small plastic box
Stupidly I forgot to buy batteries so I had to liberate one from the pile of remote controls under the coffee table.
Putting the kit together wasn’t too difficult. I had never soldered before, and an electronics wizard would probably freak at my technique, but the wires are held in place firmly so no problems there. I used a dremel to cut a few holes in a plastic box I was going to use as a holder and with a copious amount of sellotape, fixed everything in place.
The first big problem is that being as how the human eye is not able to pick up infra red, there was no way for me to know if the LED was working. I just had to assume it was.
I downloaded the Wiimote software, connected the wiimote via bluetooth to my laptop and…. well.. nothing happened. I was convinced there might be a bluetooth error (its been playing up in Vista) so I installed the BlueSoleil bluetooth driver… and promptly broke my bluetooth – the only blue I got was a blue screen of death….
I then spent the next few hours trying to get bluesoleil uninstalled and my old bluetooth working again! Once fixed I decided to leave Vista alone and try it on an old XP laptop instead.
This morning I wondered if the fault lay with the LED system. In my haste yesterday I completely forgot that the D in LED stood for Diode, which meant it had to be connected in a specific kind of way (hey look, I’m a biologist, OK?). Checking the connections I found that I had connected it correctly, but more through luck than judgement.
That left the switch. There are three terminals on the switch, and I had soldered the wires to the middle one and took a guess on which end to connect it to. So I cut the switch out of the circuit and just connected the wires together.
It was then I remembered reading somewhere that some digital cameras can detect infra red light. So I tried my N95 camera and pointed it at the LED. And success! You could see that the LED had come on. So the fault lay in the way I’d connected up the switch. I can rectify that later.
I then tried to detect the LED with the wiimote and again it worked more or less OK. The only issues are
1) getting the correct angle and range for the wiimote. I didn’t get the exact LED I wanted and I dont know if this is as powerful. Range is pretty limited.
2) The plastic box shields a lot of the IR from the LED… Although I have the LED poking out through a hole in the end of the case it doesn’t get picked up by the wiimote too well.
I need to redesign my LED pen a little. I may take a leaf out of Dougs book and get a large drywipe pen and embed the LED in that. I also have another LED on order from Maplin mail order that hopefully will work better.
So at the moment, no cool video of me using my wiimote on the wall. Hopefully I can rig something better up when I get a chance next week and my components arrive from Maplins.
Watch this space.
Update: Another good tutorial on building an IWB wiimote lightpen can be found here: http://www.teacheronlinetraining.com/wiimote/wiimotesteps.html
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Vertical Surface
New from those innovative people at Microsoft – a vertical screen, that you touch and interact with. Interesting idea.
Hmm.. haven’t we seen something like that before? Or to quote Apple recently – The Wow happened 5 years ago…
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World Wide Telescope
Microsoft have finally released the public beta of their World Wide Telescope project, and I just had to write about it. It’s a must for any Science teacher, or anyone interested in astronomy.
Basically, its Microsoft’s version of Google Earth/Sky and if you’ve used the Google version in the past then you’ll pick this up very easily.
The software provides a virtual planetarium and lets you study the night sky with great detail. Some of the images are astounding. You can also switch the view to study planets and moons such as Jupiter and Io.
When looking at the stars, right clicking will bring up a star identifier which tells you the name of the star (if known) and some information about it. You can even link direct to the relevant wikipedia page.
Maybe a quick activity would be to search for their star sign (I looked up Aries) and find the names of the stars in the constellation. Maybe even find out how far away they are from Earth.
You can also point the camera downwards and study the Earth instead just like Google Earth, although not in as high resolution. A nice feature is the Earth at Night view which shows just where all the populated areas are. Interesting to use for Geography perhaps?
This is highly recommended and would be an excellent piece of software for anyone who has to teach about the Earth and space. Download it from here.
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Online Presence
One of the perils of having an online presence is that you can be looked up by anybody with access to the internet. This can include prospective/current employers and, in the case of teachers, pupils and their parents.
Here is a cautionary tale from the Washington Post. Again it outlines the dangers of having your personal life on show for all to see. Thanks to John Sutton on the Creative ICT blog for the link.
I’m on Facebook, but have avoided some of the other sites like Bebo and MySpace. I try and keep my profile slightly work-related, and just use it to keep in touch with friends and colleagues. I’m also going for the world record for the number of application invitations I am currently ignoring!
Many new teachers are making the transition from student to teacher and in September there will be another cohort starting their first teaching posts. Most of them have Facebook accounts and so can be found by pupils and parents. It’s another level of complexity from having your profile read by your boss for those in an office job.
Setting your Facebook profile to limited access is one way to stop unwelcome visitors finding out what’s on your wall, or some of your personal details. But it’s going to be harder to stop friends and colleagues posting material that contains you – such as the xmas party photographs etc etc.
It’s a shame you can’t set up private and professional versions of your profile – one only viewable by friends and one for colleagues. A kind of TwoFaced Book.
Of my group of 21 Primary PGCE students that I teach, 19 have Facebook profilesand only two of those have a viewable profile. The rest have them set to friends only – so at least the message is getting out there to protect your online identity.
Here’s a nice parody of Facebook, that really rings true. If it’s not acceptible in real life, why is it OK on Facebook?
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Read all about it!
Here’s a fun little tool that could liven up the way you present information – or make a class writing task a little more fun.
The newspaper generator lets you put your own text into a few boxes, and then generates an authentic looking newspaper article containing your text.
The finished product is very authentic, and quite impressive.
You have to save your image and host it elsewhere if you want to use it online, but it is a very quick process to host it on Flickr or similar.
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IWBs and Interactivity
One thing that a lot of people get wrong is that they believe that the IWB is inherently Interactive. That just by using it, they are making their lessons interactive. This is something I try and get across in my training sessions – that you need to work a little to put the Interactive into Interactive Whiteboard.
From a posting on Classroom2.0 I came across this fantastic presentation that challenges teachers to think about how they are using this great piece of technology. I’m reposting it here, but please go to the original post to show your appreciation.
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About Me
Danny Nicholson : Educator, Science teacher, ICT Consultant, PGCE lecturer, Author and Web2.0 / SMART Masters/ Interactive Whiteboard Trainer. Contact me for any training requests. 
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