Adventures in Teaching and Learning

My TA and I have worked on a short presentation on the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) for our Year 8 class tomorrow. It’s a bit rushed (I’ve finished it having just arrived home after seeing George Michael at Wembley …) but I’m keen to see if the SWF embedding button works.

Could be interesting … if anything shows up, then I wonder what size it will be, because I’ve got no idea and I’ve had to make up some dimensions!

I’m very tired, so this may be a bit hazy, but I wanted to blog today.

Took my Year 8 group into the computer room today (different group from the ones using spresent, and incidentally I’ve not seen any completed presentations yet …). Wanted to show them a couple of videos that they have produced, and which I made this morning into a Mediator presentation, but unfortunately what had worked earlier on a different computer did not work on the necessary computer in my particular room. Hmph. Anyway, I had set up four tasks for the pupils on the Year 8 Blog, and only one required them to actually watch the videos. So I asked them to log on and to try and complete the other tasks, in any order.

Unfortunately, because I was also trying to fix the video programme, I wasn’t able to explain as well as I would have liked. However, most pupils at one point or another visited the link to the internet safety website. Most pupils at one point were on the comments task as well.

However, at the end of the day, when I went to moderate all the comments, there were only six entered! (And one was empty …) So there’s still some work to be done there … most didn’t seem to have any prior knowledge of blogs, so I’ll need to bear that in mind when I’m planning my research project. I do think that there’s potential, though, so I’m going to stick with it. Next Friday is Sports’ Day, so the Friday after that, I hope to get them blogging again. Let’s hope they actually submit it this time though!

Janet was there to see what we were doing and to help out. It definitely helps having more than one person in the room, especially since the pupils ask for a lot of help to begin with. It’s great to have someone to bounce ideas off!

Well, I’ve had my last lesson with the Year 7s in the ICT room today. They are due to show me their www.spresent.com presentations on Wednesday. I hope I will be able to copy down their urls / embed codes and share some with you next week. However, first of all they have to complete their presentations – and unfortunately there are some pupils who will still have open a new account and work out by themselves what to do.

However, I had a whole row of pupils who had logged on and were working out how to use spresent. A couple asked if they could use powerpoint instead, since they knew what to do with that, but I explained that they would be able to access this presentation anywhere. Some pupils were getting frustrated that they couldn’t copy and paste text, but I showed them ctrl c and ctrl v and that fixed that problem. One girl couldn’t copy her picture from the internet, but I showed her how to copy the url of the site with the picture, and then we inserted a web image, so that was sorted.

A couple of pupils thought it looked a bit boring … until I showed them how to change the background and the font, then they got more interested!

But the best bit was when one girl asked how to do something the boy sitting next to her had done, and he offered to teach her how to insert the text book if she showed him how to insert a picture from the web!

So I am hopeful that there might be at least three or four good presentations that I will be able to share with you …

I’m obviously an idiot. I’m off to check out Judy’s blog about this – I hope I will manage it, one day. Although I have to say, the first presentation is not really worth the wait, so don’t get your hopes up!!!

So my main concerns are:

1) I’m running out of space on my Mac
2) I’m still waiting to get spresent embedded properly in my blog
3) My podbean.com account is almost full
4) Some of my individual files are too big to save onto a disk and I can’t really afford to buy an external harddrive at the moment (hadn’t planned on needing to do that when I started the course!)
5) I still can’t access the internet at home
6) This means I can’t upload some of my documents to the internet since the laptop I use for the internet is a bit older and won’t accept all the files
7) Still not resolved the headphones and microphones issue at school
The microphone on my headphones doesn’t work … must remember to mail Judy about that!

9) It’s late, and I’ve been exhausted recently, and I can’t believe I’m still up. Goodnight!

10) The number 8 has turned into a smiley …

Reading

I’ve decided to leave up what happens when I try to embed my spresent presentation. I saved my presentation, Publish > Embed > Copy > Paste into message body of my blog. Any ideas? Am I doing something wrong?