Friday 8 March 2013

Mark’s bundle of coolness – ILT session (2 March Study Day)

from Mark Tinney:

PowToon.com – This is a new online presentation tool which allows you to create navigable animated presentations or videos up to about 5 minutes in length (for the free version).  There is a bit of a learning curve to getting used to them, but there are a number of templates which make the basics very easy.  You can even publish them straight to youtube.

TED.com – I have talked about TED several times at these events, in part because it is that good.  The site is full of great talks from experts in several fields and even better they also post some of the best and most inspiring videos from across the web.  As if the site needed to get even better, it has.  Ted has added TEded this is a portion of the site that allows you to create learning materials from any TED talk or YouTube video.  Students can create a free account and you can track their results.

PollEverywhere.com – This is another website I have mentioned in several session, it is awesome and allows you to create quiz or poll questions that learners can respond to via text, or a unique web address you can create through the site, they can even respond via twitter.

QRStuff.com – This is the website I use to create QR codes, you know those funny –looking codes that you can scan with your phone and then pull up a website or a body of text of virtually any bit of information you want learners to have.

In one group I was able to look at Morfo Booth, this is an Apple app that allows you to take any picture of someone, that is face front and animate it, adding sound and even making your own video.  This is great for learner projects, mini biographies or just a fun way to present information.  My learners love it. (Also available for Android but possibly not yet in the UK --James)

Playbrighter.com – This is a quiz website (a game website really) that allows you to create groups of learners and quizzes (called missions on the site) for the learners to complete.  Grades are kept, as is your question bank for the next time you want to use it.  It is free to try, although after 10 quizzes it is a fee based site, but it is worth it I promise.

Sporcle.com - We didn’t look at this in either session, but I have done so in previous sessions, this is a quiz website as well, completely free and full of loads of brilliant prebuilt content and you can build your own.  This is great for just a bit of fun as well as some serious learning.

We began each session by playing a game called hungry bat, which is available at this address
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Lightnin/1659457

Thank you for your time and warm welcome on Saturday, I hope you found the session useful.  The key is try something new, and see if it works.

Monday 4 March 2013

Year 2 Study Day--2 March

No usual evaluation report this time, I'm afraid. I can only apologise for not having organised the collection of the forms efficiently enough, and the 24 forms we did collect were not sufficient to have any claim to be representative.

However, you can still read the contributions to the Question Time slot via Twitter (#pce2) and add any write-in comments you wish.

In particular, Shane tweeted thus with the information you were requesting about QTS/QTLS and IfL;

Links for : QTS/QTLS advice & membership
 ...but as promised, we shall be circulating everyone with that information shortly.

Thanks to everyone for their contributions to the day, and we hope you took away useful information and ideas for Unit 7.