R U Blogging?

If your school is trying blogging in any form, be it with a specific club or class, or a whole school effort - please let me know, and I'll add it to our del.icio.us account, so that other interested parties can read, get ideas, and potentially feedback comments to give your children a wider audience for their work.
Either comment below, or email: john.legood@derbyshire.gov.uk
You can view the links at: http://del.icio.us/DerbyshireICT/blogs

ICT briefings

Briefings for ICT co-ordinators/subject leaders are upon us again. See the extranet for dates, but are running from 28th April to 8th May, 2008. Hope to see you at one of them.

Computer Animation Competition and more

The University of Manchester is running a Computer Animation Competition for UK school Children using Alice, a free downloadable computer animation system. http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/Digital60 The competition closes on 1 May but I would recommend looking at the programme anyway. I've used Storytelling Alice and love it. I could see it being used not just for ICT but also in literacy - it certainly got my class of year 5's involved in storytelling - they did not want to go out for break on the first sunny day of the year!! It sparked loads of discussion about plot, dialogue, characterisation, etc you can even go into camera angles and lighting. I'm also thinking about using it for an introduction to control.

Dr John mentioned Buzz Webz. I'm currently involved in the trial. It's great in that it's easy to publish the children's work and allows them to collaborate on projects but I have to say that feed back from my pupil's is that it's a bit limited - they feel they have more options in Textease. It depends what your objectives are. It would be at it's best I think if you wanted an easy way for children to collaborate and publish work. I personally don't think it would stretch pupils aiming to develop ICT skills. I'm more excited to get going on the VLE - if it's as good as it looks it could revolutionise the way we work.

Pete - not just your class I was so tired watching the early morning news yesterday that it did not occur strange that penguins could fly!! and I'm currently..... (abducted by aliens?)

Flying Penguins

Terry Jones reports on a new BBC programme, 'Miracles of Evolution'...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/epeng001.shtml?src=ip_potpw

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/01/npenguin101.xml

and how they made the April Fool's film......!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/epeng002.shtml?src=ip_potpw

Well, my class fell for it big time...!