jom

Indeed!... To be fair I did get about £20 extra on my bill, for 10 days away... but it was worth it!! What a geek I am!! :-)

So - I have just come back from my holiday in Italy (Sorrento). I thought I would blog about how technology helped my holiday, as without it, I don't know where I would have been! So - my iHoliday started with online check-in, through the Expedia app on my iPhone - I booked the holiday through this company, and I was enlightened to hear an airport "Ding, Dong" noise the day before we ventured to Heathrow Terminal 4. This sound was alerting me to the fact that it was time to check-in. I connected to the Wifi and checked us in, choose the seats and was presented with a QR code boarding pass! This was brilliant - when we arrived at Heathrow to see the very long, windy queue for check-in, a very helpful lady asked us if we had got Smart phone check-in passes - to which I answered yes. We were taken to a queue with about 3 people in, showed our phones, and within seconds we checked in, paperless and with no baggage!! Very impressed! Throughout the holiday, I used the following apps on my iPhone: Around Me - to find local places of interest, restaurants and bars. Flashlight - to help us with the dark walk home to our hotel (there were no street lamps!) Compass - I never thought I'd use this - but I needed it to follow to find certain places of interest! Notes - to make notes for this blog post! Sound Cloud - I used this to record sounds from the woods - I uploaded (Facebook and Twitter apps), in order to ask my friends what they thought it was! Camera - this was my digital camera for the holiday. Weather - to find out what the weather was like in different Italian cities, and at home! So - that was my holiday app and smart phone usage, which all-in-all I was very impressed with. What would I have done without the phone? I suppose you could say I would have used more conversation - asked people where to go, found out where restaurants were on my own, not known the weather, and perhaps not have taken as many photos!! I love technology, and I used it to help me - a lot! What can I say!? Well done iPhone!

Thanks for this Matthew, a very quick and useful reply. FROGos seems to be turning out ok and there are lots of useful and more easily adaptable elements to it, than Frog 3. Will keep you posted of our trial, Cheers Joe

Been a long time since I blogged on here. I have been in iPad training all day today for my school. We are introducing iPads across the school for some lessons. Each department will have to deliver a unit of work solely through iPads. It will be an interesting experiment, and I remain semi-sceptical about it, yet a little excited. Some of the apps that we are using and testing are great, and hold fantastic potential for teaching and learning and assessment. We are however also trialling FrogOS with the iPads - we have been using Frog 3 for this year, which has been interesting. Some staff and taken it on board well, and others not. I suppose this is always the case. I have been reading on here some other people vent their Frog issues. Every VLE will have its issues and technical negatives, but it seems that Frog is quite widely disliked in many ways. It is interesting to read about lots of people finding the whole "refresh" thing being an issue - whenever you go back or to another page, Frog reloads to the home page, losing all what you had created / been viewing. This also happens when you press F5. It seems (having trialled FrogOS for a while now) that FrogOS still does this!! You would have thought that Frog would have sorted this by now!! It can't be that hard, surely? Other than that though, I have to say that FrogOS seems easier and much more user friendly for teachers adding pages, creating content etc. What are your thoughts? Anyone been using Frog for a long time? Any one using FrogOS? Over and out.

So Easter is nearly here for us in Schools. Today at 3.30pm I will be loading my car with boxes and boxes of GCSE and A-Level work to mark over the Easter holidays. What can I say - fun, fun, fun! I have been busy in Year 10 lessons preparing my students for an exam on 6th June - Cambridge Nationals in ICT. The unit of study is Computer Systems and does involve, very much the use of computer systems and the more technical aspects of the subject - networks, hardware, etc. The pupils seem to be enjoying it, however there is a certain "lecturing" nature to the teaching, which I have not been used to. This is of course an IT course which we have had to introduce on the back of Mr Gove's exam style courses, being an obligations for today's kids. Personally... I'm not sure about it. My questions are thus: are these kids getting anything out of me standing at the front lecturing them for an exam they have in 6 weeks or so? Surely the more practical route and method of teaching is better, and coursework which shows their understanding? I don't know, it is an interesting argument. Perhaps I need to adapt my new "lecture" type teaching style to be a little more interesting! I'm trying... honest! Happy Easter!

Thanks for comment Vikpaw - I didn't get chance to go to the sessions on iPads, which I regret. Perhaps I would have got some ideas from there. As you say it needs trials in small groups, which I think our school are going to do next year with some year 7s. We will see how it goes. I also have heard the positives about Chrome books - we are looking into this now. Thanks for the links to the slides, very useful. With regards to OCR and Raspberry Pis, as I said, they were very good indeed and showed how you can do simple programming to make things like lights and motors work from code. They have now put the resources online: ICT and Computing - Raspberry Pi - OCR. Joe

Well, I said I was going to BETT and here I am blogging about it. Thanks to LickOfPaint for the comment - I remember going to BETT a couple of years ago and joining Edugeek as a result. I have been using it for hints and tips and to find out info. about certain things, but had never blogged before. So, I was glad to see your comment - thanks! So - BETT was, as ever, exciting, inspiring and a good event where I was able to see the latest gadgets and gizmos for my classroom. I should say at this point that I am an ICT Teacher. So - the stands which I wanted to visit were Edugeek, OCR (for its Raspberry Pi demos) and Microsoft for its gaming (Kodu). I was really impressed with the Raspberry Pi elements that I saw at BETT - OCR were really good and have given me some excellent ideas to use in the classroom - not only free resources, but a great demo. I also found a great company called FUZE (Buy Software :: BinaryDistribution.com, Where downloadbuyer meets business :: Binary Distribution), who have built some great stuff for the Raspberry Pis to sit in and allow kids to programme and see the results on PCBs attached to the Pi. As I say, the Microsoft stand I visited demonstrated the use of Kodu, which I was very impressed with - I will be using this with my kids. The school that I am currently working in is very keen to go down the 'tablets for everyone' root and try to use iPads in lessons more for interactivity and suchlike. Seeing as there has been so much press and hype about this at the moment, I was shocked not to see much about the use of tablets, at BETT. There was plenty of storage solutions for this, but not many ideas. It does make me think that perhaps it has not been fully trialled and perhaps not seen as fully beneficial, therefore no one is shouting about it? What do you think? Anyway - there we have it, my BETT experience. Always an inspiring visit and something that reminds me why I teach ICT. I shall update you on my progress with FUZE products and Raspberry Pi lessons!

Agreed - we use Password Control from WiseSoft, and its great, quick and easy to use. Highly recommended. WiseSoft - Resources for IT Professionals

Well, my first post on my Edugeek blog!! I have had the account since January 2010 and never even knew there was a Blogging platform, built in to the site! I have loved Edugeek and its forums / blogs since I went to BETT in January 2010 (hence joining then!), and I am currently mega-excited (yes, I know, a little sad!) about BETT this year, as I am going up on Thursday. What makes it better this year, is that I am taking a group of Year 13 BTEC students with me! This should be fun, and I can teach them exactly how to get as many freebees as possible. The best trick is to take spare and extra carrier bags! Anyway, I shall report back after the event itself.

Hi Chris, great to hear your story and congratulations on getting the job! It sounds like you're going to be straight in the deep end, which is where your experience will start! I did a similiar degree to you at Southampton Solent University, (Computer Systems and Networking), but decided to go down the PGCE root! I'm a teacher now... Edugeek will be excellent for you I think, there is so many great people on it and help is always at hand! Good luck with everything, and using Edugeek! JOM ICT Teacher, DORSET.

Thanks for some of the helpful comments from people here! I shall look into the ones you have mentioned. Cheers for your help.

Well, if you can get free software that'll do the trick - why not!! And we like to spend our money on other, better things!!

Hi all, Have been reading the posts here, but was wondering about a replacement for Movie Maker (free please!) for our school. We have just purchased some fantastic new video cams, which use a memory stick to store the video files. But they are MPEG, and Movie maker doesn't like them! Any ideas on alternatives please.... Cheers. Joe Gryphon School, Sherborne, DORSET.

Hi, I'm Joe - ICT teacher from a 1500 pupil secondary school in Dorset. Great school with fantastic ICT facilities and network. Saw Edugeek at BETT and was told all about it, by Witch! It sounded excellent... just my kind of thing! I'm a geek myself, but fairly new to all things e-learningm, so looking forward to using Edugeek to find out about people's experieneces with certain software, online and e-learning tools etc. Our school is using Serco VLE and MIS at the moment. Any comments / views on this? Look forward to more edugeek blogging / posts. JOM