DISQUS

Thanks Lars, I'm going to plough on with this next week, I'll compose a post with a bit more detail in the near future.

Lots of rain today so postponed until Wednesday :(

Hi Paul,
Thanks for your comment, I'll keep you updated. Have I got the general gist of the lesson structure 'right'?
Cheers,
Dan

Thanks! I've been thinking of doing something similar with the Assessing Pupil Progress Maths objectives that the LEAs seem keen to inflict upon us.
Good luck with yours!
Dan

Thanks!
Have played a little with Diigo, always hear good things about it. Have invested so much time in delicious that I can't bring myself to move over!
Dan

A free laptop? Wouldn't that be nice! :)

Simon, I know what you mean, agreeing on one tag to bind them all is tricky. I avoided 'maths' as I thought it a little too generic. But my 'msow' is perhaps a little too obscure.
I like the idea of an overall tag, it would mean you don't have to check your whole network stream on a daily basis, but could just run a search, knowing that the results all come from teachers.
Any other opinions on how best to go about this greatly welcome....

If you've already got things running on wordpress.org then the export/import process couldn't be simpler. It's a shame, but those ads just aren't appropriate for classroom/pupil blogs.

Thanks Elona, just add 'msow' and then any other tags and we can keep them all together.

Thanks Mark. I will get around to blogging my initial impressions soon...

Sorry Richard, I obviously didn't look very hard!!

Cheers Neil, that saved me nearly 5Gb!!!

It is running through Feedburner, and it's set to full feed in the wordpress options, it's got me a bit mystified at the moment...

Sorted, thanks Doug, finally got my own gravatar to show aswell.
Next stop - full rss feeds, not sure why it's shortening them at the moment...

I couldn't agree more Michelle. It is only a small matter of time until numerous pupils have iphones on their pocket with unlimited data plans. Shortly after that I can see them having netbooks with similar data plans, I'd seriously consider supplying my son/daughter (if I had one!) with one if they had to put up with our network.

great minds!

Doug, I'm going to run into that argument, and I can see the point. How does one explain the benefits of putting stuff onto the whole web, not just inside the VLE? Especially when I haven't had the opportunity to extend any of my projects to include collaboration with people outside of our school. Principle is not reason enough I fear.

No gmail access, thank god for iPhone! When I get back from my hols in Feb with a new laptop from NYC I am tempted to jailbreak my iPhone and use the 3G with my personal laptop to bypass all filtering when in school.

Rob, you can indeed but it is at least seen to be auditable, as would google docs, but thats beside the point!

Thanks for your comments.

I know, I don't want to get into a moan about the 'someones' on a public blog, I do have a good working relationship with the IT department and senior leadership, I just need to change their ways!

Yes, both are great, I hope to make time to move this blog in the direction of discussing teaching rather than the tools, especially as my attempts to use web2.0 at school are constantly thwarted by our IT!

Thanks Doug, in reply:

1. It's a fair point ;) Ourselves and English are, for the time being at least, flavour of the month. We all know the reason for this at present. I think it's a shame so much emphasis (and lets be honest, funding) is placed on us at present to the detriment of other subjects.

2. Let's hope so!

I think it's interesting also that the 40% of lessons deemed 'satisfactory' are in fact being classified as not good enough. Another way to look at the statistics would be to say that despite the chronic shortages in many areas only 5% of teaching has been deemed 'unsatisfactory'. Perhaps Ofsted need a new word to describe that calibre of lessons?! Lies, damned lies and statistics :)

Hi Stan, apologies for such a long delay in replying - I've been 'off network' for most of the summer!

The day went OK, although only having just under an hour with each group limited what we could achieve. I curtailed the creativity a little by getting everyone to make a maze game and showing them how to draw the maze, add a character and map directional control keys to that character. I then left them some hints as to where to take their games to next.

Didn't get round to uploading their games, I'll try and do it when back in school.

Instructions I used are here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/5236778/Scratch-Maze-...

Hi Alex, how are you? I always assume that no-one I actually know reads this thing.

I am still searching for the answer to the homework problem.

When we've set them on mymaths we have always given the pupils at least a week to complete them and expected those without access to use the library computers at some point during that week.

I suppose a limited number of printed copies could be done, a homework tends to run to only two screens.

We've also tried posting old fashioned paper homeworks home this term, there has been a marginally higher completion of these but still not great.

I still don't think we can move to totally online work in the environments we teach in.

Perhaps no homework is the answer?

Hi Richard,
Thanks for the link, I've registered and I'll try it out with some pupils in the near future.
Thanks,
Dan

Thanks Ross, I'll have a look.

Dan

Oops! I didn't check that very well! Nevermind :)