Adventures in Teaching and Learning

That’s annoying. I was almost finished this post when the computer crashed. Nevermind. Here are today’s “episodes”: an mp3 and a .m4a enhanced podcast about Virtue Ethics, for my AS class. Hope you can access the enhanced version okay … I spent ages doing some of the screenshots. Then realised they were too big so you can’t read them all.
virtue_ethics.m4a

virtue_ethics.mp3

I’m now back home, so hopefully I’ll find it a bit easier to reflect on all of today’s activities.

First of all, I’ve enjoyed chatting to quite a few people today – it’s good to be able to put faces to the names of people whose blogs I’ve looked at or whose names I’ve seen on the list. We’re obviously quite a mix of people from a wide variety of subject backgrounds and with a range of experiences in teaching and in ICT, which is great. It’s been nice to be able to help some people out with things, and I’ve appreciated help from people with some of the things that have been bothering me, or that I couldn’t do.

I found it very frustrating not to simply be able to go on to my blog, or to Fronter, and quickly upload all the stuff I have on my computer that I’ve produced and would like to be able to share. It’s understandable when you have loads of people logging on to the wireless connection at once that things are going to be slow, but I was surprised at just how frustrating I was finding it! Probably didn’t help that I am still feeling guilty at not having managed to complete my reports yet. Must be emailed to a colleague tonight, so that’s what I’ll be doing after this!

Flickr. I wasn’t in the session that covered Flickr, but I hope that now more people know how to access it I’ll have more friends on there! If you haven’t become my Friend yet, please invite me … you can access my profile from one of my photos on my blog, then send an invite from that page. You will also have access to the profiles of my friends, whom I think at the moment consist of Judy, Tessa, Claire and John. At least, I think that’s how it works!

One of the things I am really interested in will (I hope) be on the agenda for tomorrow – using blogs with pupils. Which leads me onto another reflection – I hope that now there has been some more input on blogging, more of you on the programme will be posting more … I look forward to visiting other blogs and seeing what other people are getting up to, so I can be inspired by your great ideas! Personally, the communication aspect of this course, the whole idea of Web 2.0 and Personalised Learning using forums, blogs etc, is one of the parts of the course that interests me the most. You might have realised that I love talking, whether in “real life” or on the web … I love reading and gaining fresh insights from others too! Communication, communication, communication.

I have picked up a few new ideas from the audio and OpenMind sessions. Some of it was frustrating, because I’ve already experimented quite a bit, but there’s always something new to learn, for example, how to add pictures to a podcast episode (or whatever I should call them!), and how to add extra information to an OpenMind document.

However, OpenMind did raise one of the most frustrating features for me … the fact it’s so annoyingly difficult (not hard, inconvenient more than anything) to move from Mac to PC. All those lovely ComicLife documents, Keynote presentations, GarageBand podcasts, elusively hiding on Mac, when I want to upload them onto OpenMind! It’s such a faff to be restarting the computer, memory stick in hand, saving, restarting etc.

Still loads of possibilities, though, and I’m really looking forward to the pedagogical side of the learning tomorrow.

I have just started a podcast blog thing … I was hoping it would help me post podcasts here and on my other blog, but I’m not sure.

Anyway, this could take a bit longer … my first attempt to upload has failed … apparently my podcast has been saved in .m4a which is an unsupported format. Back to the drawing board! How can I save it as .mp3 or .m4v or other similar format? I produced the 5 minute long podcast using GarageBand.

Hmm. I am wanting to embed a swf file … I have had fun experimenting with CrazyTalk this evening. I now have three talking philosophers. However, I want to include them in a Keynote presentation, and therein lies the problem (or two). The CrazyTalk video seems to be far too big (it’s in GB rather than MB …) to move easily from computer to computer attached to internet, and I feel that downloading something this big could prove problematic. Secondly, I am trying to add a GarageBand audio that I’ve recorded, and even though I am following the instructions (ie drag the file into the slide that you want it to play over), nothing is happening. I don’t think the slide is recognising the file, even though I have saved it as an iLife project, and it has a little guitar logo. Can anybody help?! Thanks.

I’m at the CLC learning how to do lots of amazing things on my new MacBook … Very excited and I’m looking forward to trying everything out at home. I’m a bit frustrated, though, at the fact that I can’t access the internet – I hope it works okay at home! Claire has let me use her internet today, though.

We’re just being told about the task for next time. We’ve to try to use as many different software packages as possible and produce something small. Or big. Something.

So … today we’ve learnt about CrazyTalk, ComicLife, Pages, Keynote, GarageBand, Fronter, iMovies, iPhoto … I have recorded some of the talks, and need to work out how to make them into podcasts.

I will blog later to describe some of the things we’ve done.