So Much to Learn...So Little Time

links for 2009-05-03

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  obama's flickr page is just superb. http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/ [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1672321772]
  (tags: tweecious Barack Obama Homeland Security Council Cabinet Room White House Department of Health Creative Commons Flickr Executive Office the President United States)

links for 2009-04-30

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  RT @lynnehorn: Interested in flashmeeting for mfl teachers,Monday 4 May 9pm.Sign up here http://tinyurl.com/d5ev84 #mflflashmtg [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1637098394]
  (tags: tweecious Creative Commons licenses Public domain Grosvenor Grammar School Bideford Northgate High Chiltern Edge Stockton-on-Tees)

links for 2009-04-26

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  Link: Olympic diver Tom Daley temporarily removed from school over bullying | Sport | guardian.co.uk - This... http://tumblr.com/x771noe40 [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1619066024]
  (tags: tweecious RSS Tumblr Tom Daley Bullying Guardian.co.uk Twitter On the Web Syndication and Feeds)
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  Posted 'Namibia by 3G2' to blip.tv: http://blip.tv/file/2037637 [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1619050029]
  (tags: tweecious Flash Video MPEG-4 QuickTime Namibia Creative Commons Television RSS music clips shorts film animation cgi ads commercial)
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  @skinnermike don't look at this then. http://healthmap.org/en [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1618996007]
  (tags: tweecious United States Infectious disease Influenza Mexico City Health Avian Conditions and Diseases)
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  RT @mashable On World Malaria Day, a $10 net can protect a family as they sleep. Pls donate & Retweet! http://bit.ly/30Io8 [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1611400871]
  (tags: tweecious Web Design and Development Philanthropy Promotion Pay-Per-Click Advertising Free Donations Donation Search Engines Services)

Namibia by 3G2

Click to Play

This is the combined speaking presentation by my S3 German class.

We have been studying Namibia and over the holidays they had to revise for a speaking test. For this film I prepared a series of slides in keynote. I then wrote up a compliation of sentences from my students drafts and cut them up. The students then had to randomly chose a sentence and get themselves into the correct order.

I then called them up to record their sentence and here is the result.I then exported the recorded presentation to garageband, added a soundtrack and then exported to iTunes.

The music is "Journey To Town" by Cyberdread, available at www.jamendo.com

links for 2009-04-25

• Good Morning Scotland
  RT @iusher: just listened to @markpentleton on BBC Scotland - he's at 2:42:20 in http://bit.ly/gEWRV - nice one Mr P [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1605095802]
  (tags: tweecious Gary Robertson BBC Radio Scotland Good Morning CSS Cascading Style Sheets JavaScript iPlayer Web browser)
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  Posted 'La Vie en RDC - La Vie en Ecosse' to blip.tv: http://blip.tv/file/2027345 [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1594772057]
  (tags: tweecious Democratic Republic of Congo Facebook Flash Video Africa RSS Business and Economy Warfare Conflict Guides Directories)

Citizenship In the Modern Languages Classroom - A Resource by SCIAF

Inspired by Lynne Horn I decided to bring a little bit of Congo to my classroom.

In a few short weeks I will lose my S2 class who will be split up according to their choices. No doubt some will have the dubious pleasure of me as their teacher for another 2 years, others will get off lightly. Anyway I was looking for something interesting to round off the term and I remembered Lynne blogging about a resource produced by the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund (SCIAF) "Citoyens du Monde - La Vie en RDC" aimed specifically at French classes which took a look at life in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

This resource looks not only at learning a language but it gives scope for pupils to examine their thoughts and feelings about their lives both here in Scotland and in the DRC. It allows for pupils to express themselves in French but also in English when the concepts are perhaps beyond their capability in French.

This week was our first step on this journey. Having introduced them to DRC via my own knowledge and a trailer for a documentary I found on YouTube,

 the pupils had to answer a series of questions about themselves and life in Scotland. The questionnnaire is in 3 sections, the first of which my class was able to answer in French.

The other 2 sections asked deeper questions about pupils' hopes and aspirations such as what they would say to a world leader. These questions, I let them answer in English as I didn't want language to be a barrier to their thoughts.

I'd like to say that they all treated the exercise with due respect, but they are teenagers and some were not quite as serious as others. However I was pleased with what they came up with. As we had a sunny day on Wednesday I took the class outside, split them into 3 groups and gave each group a camera so that each pupil could record their thoughts. I wanted to do this because at the end of this project I want the students to revisit some of their answers to see if they have changed.

Anyway here is the resultant film. Some of the dialogue is difficult to make out due papers rustling and others chatting but I like what they came up with.

sciaf, citizenship, french, language, learning, drc, rdc, congo

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links for 2009-04-23

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  My Twitter personality: popular inquisitive cautious My style: chatty coherent TALKER http://twanalyst.com/adamsutcliffe [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1587345888]
  (tags: tweecious Twitter hashtag Time zone Uniform Resource Locator web 2.0 LiveJournal Social Networking)
• Your Twitter personality (click to tweet it!)
  I'm a Talker and my tweeting is "tip top". http://twanalyst.com/adamsutcliffe/ [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1587326673]
  (tags: tweecious Twitter hashtag Time zone Uniform Resource Locator web 2.0 LiveJournal Social Networking)

links for 2009-04-17

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  Posted 'Hair Today' to blip.tv: http://blip.tv/file/2004662 [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1542108805]
  (tags: tweecious Flash Video RSS Microsoft Creative Commons Share-alike Web QuickTime Television)
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  RT @diannekrause: Check this out... Twitter Useful for Education? http://tinyurl.com/cqypol [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1541322279]
  (tags: tweecious Twitter Google TweetDeck RSS Web WordPress Social Networks Online Communities)
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  " In the education timeline blogs have only been around for a millimeter or so. The possibilities are e..." http://tweetthistext.com/1510 [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1540582229]
  (tags: tweecious Twitter Google All Rights Reserved HTTP John Johnston Blog United Artists On the Web)
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  Link: KOCE - Brilliantly creative film idea, shame I’m not back at school otherwise could get students... http://tumblr.com/x771lpodm [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1536701024]
  (tags: tweecious Tumblr RSS Twitter Web Blog Syndication and Feeds WWW Feed Readers)
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  MFL E's and O's very briefly annotated with a.nnotate.com http://bit.ly/5jb1X Feel free to add to it. [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1535725058]
  (tags: tweecious Gmail Time management Uniform Resource Locator Data Formats Document Publishing HTML PDF)
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  Link: The Voyage of the Beagle - Darwin goes / went all 2.0. Geez what tense do you use to write about... http://tumblr.com/x771lnu66 [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1534416539]
  (tags: tweecious RSS Voyage of the Beagle Tumblr On Web Syndication and Feeds Charles Darwin WWW)
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  @mrslwalker could this be why http://twitter.com/cdarwin has resurrected himself . I wonder? [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1534336468]
  (tags: tweecious Rio Negro Charles Darwin South America Wickham RSS Mobile phone Application programming interface Beagle)
• Bin Forest Walk (Yellow Trail)
  Done lunch (bacon butties (with brown 4 me)), done bike ride (here http://bit.ly/6EJfm) made bolognaise sauce. Now what..muck about on DS:) [from http://twitter.com/adamsutcliffe/statuses/1534317543]
  (tags: tweecious Multimap Roe Deer Scotland Internet Explorer Public transport Crown copyright Red Squirrel Agriculture)

Hair Today

Click to Play

Aïcha got her hair braided yesterday. Surprisingly it didn't take as long as usual as Jeannette didn't do the braids as long as she often does.

I decided to film it using I Can Animate's Time Lapse function. I set it to take a frame every 30 seconds. So if I tell you it took 679 frames that means 337.5 minutes or over 5 and a half hours. Some work.

As you can see Aïha had a little sleep while the work went on.

I cooked tea.

BBC News School Report

BBC NEWS | School Report | News Day 2009



Phew what a day. Along with one of my colleagues in the English Department I have been involved in helping an S2 class with their work for BBC School Report.

There were 4 groups working on different topics, which they've been working on over a few weeks now in their English lessons. They had to do real journalist stuff such as researching their topics and finding useful people to interview. They then had to prepare for the interviews, by making all the necessary arrangements to meet with the interviewees.

And then today they had to put the finishing touches to their films, with links and pieces to camera and then they had to edit their work.

It really is an extraordinarily intense day, but the students get to put real work skills into practice with a concret goal. Two of them even got to speak live on the special online radio station set up by the beeb.

Once again the students pulled out all the stops and came up with the goods, just see for yourself here.

My role in all this was a kind of technical assistant and I did no where near as much as my English colleague who remained supercool throughout.

The one issue I have with the whole thing is in no way related to the school, the students or the project; my issue is with technology??? WHAT? EH? SURELY NOT?
Well yes.

Why is there no common protocol for video file types. The (frankly not worth the money you pay for them) hard drive camcorders record in .MOD format, but to enable us to edit we had to convert to avi, which therefore required some conversion software. Some of these camcorders record in .VOB and there are various other formats. WHY, Why WHY?
Why does JVC have to differ from Sony, from Panasonic etc. Give me my mini dv camcorder anyday. Image quality is far better. Easier to import, even if you have to do it realtime.

Anyway enough of that. it was a super day and I hope to do it again next year

bbcschoolreport, bbc, news, school

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