The team at MIT have now released details of the next version. An interesting one is the ability to create your own blocks – i.e. creating your own functions or subroutines. Have a look at the You Tube video below for more.

She is an AS student at Wallace High School and is obviously very talented. The equipment used is a Wacom Bamboo tablet, along with Photoshop Elements that came with it and After Effects to compose the film. The background music really complements the work.

The technique is called rotoscoping and it takes a LOT of work. This one took around a thousand drawings to complete.

The Sketchbook from Wallace High on Vimeo.

Teaching teachers virtually

Enter an University of Central Florida project called TeachLivE™. This is a virtual class room in which a teacher can practice new skills. It is used by pre-service and in-service teachers in ten Universities across the United States.

“We developed a synergistic research agenda across the ten  universities, with a focus on supporting new and practicing teachers; using our “virtual classroom” to target effective teaching behaviors.  ”

A research project called ‘Measures of Effective Teaching’ supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is used to help create a template for the environment.

Maybe we will see it travel to the UK sometime.

Article here

Changes include

• Portability: Instead of the traditional rows of students facing a whiteboard, wireless devices encourages the classroom to be more group orientated, with clusters of students carrying out work and research in small teams
• Less paper: These devices can easily hold a complete set of e-Textbooks. This will cut down on storage, having tatty dog eared books to use and perhaps less printing
• More convenient: Textbooks are heavy to carry, thus tablets will lighten the burden
• Multi-purpose: A tablet machine can hold many useful applications, including e-reader, calculator, organiser and so on.
• Multi-media: Creative applications include painting apps, video editing apps and so on. Thus offering a chance for classes to make exciting new ways of learning
• Electronic marking and submission: Many schools now use electronic marking. So why not complete the whole workflow by having students submit their work wirelessly as well.

That is the theory. But how does it work out in practice? Well, have a look at this pdf article about how Broadclyst primary school has been using wireless technology including tablets.

Presentation here

Features include

• Built in Flash cards
• Motion Graphs to show things changing over time
• Specialised forms to be used for plenary creation
• 66 interesting ways to use Google Forms

We read about exciting new technologies such as CSS3 with its gradient and shadow commands, HTML5 with its animation and video tags and yet many users cannot take advantage of them. Moreover, web designers keep having to compromise their designs just to render their pages in IE6.

Microsoft have put together a site called ‘The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown‘ site to try and encourage people to leave the ancient browser behind and start using the latest standards comliant IE9

IE6 countdown

We wish them all success in retiring the old browser.

Give it a go, it is bound to make you smile. 

 Click here to access The Drama Button

Thanks to Mark Clarkson for the heads up about this.

Idea 1: “Computer on a card”. A company has put together a complete computer embedded in the card along with touch buttons on the surface. One card can act as a number of cards. You have to enter a pin every time you use it, so if it gets lost or stolen it is just a dead piece of plastic.

Idea 2: Smart phone adaptor. With this you plug in a small device into the smart phone that is able to act as a credit card.

Idea 3: Bling tag. This is an electronic tag with a social network aspect to it. Say a cafe is having a slow day and they want to attract some more custom. They go into their Bling facebook account and make a special offer active for the next two hours – say 50% off everything. Anyone linked to the facebook page will see the offer – customer wins with a bargain and the cafe wins by not having to advertise in the traditional way.

This could be used to prompt a discussion in the classroom about the future of banking, ecommerce and mobile payments or how social networking can be used to promote products.  Perhaps students could conduct their own research and find out how whether their friends and family would be prepared to use some of the new features.

It always amuses me to see their faces when I show them a picture of my very first computer, a BBC Micro, and tell them about the amazing new games I could play on it such as Pong and Space Invaders.  I was well ahead of my time back then, being the only person in our village to own a computer.  For a long time we were one of the most popular destinations for after school visits from my son’s friends.

However, if you ask students nowadays to tell you a bit about earlier computers then they will most probably shrug and get that familiar glazed look which tells you that they don’t have a clue what you are on about. 

Now they will have no excuses for the next time you ask because the people over at the techking site have put together an amazing infographic detailing the history of computers from 1939 all the way up to 2010. 

The infographic is broken down into decades and contains clear images, dates and a short text snippet about each type of computer.  It would look great split into the different decades, printed out perhaps on photographic paper and used as part of an informative classroom display.

Access the infographic from here

Did you know that you can use the advanced search feature in Google to either show the reading level of all search results i.e. basic, intermediate and advanced?

Alternatively, you can choose a specific reading level for the search results you would like shown i.e. you can choose to only show intermediate reading level results.

This is a really simple feature to use and we have created a step-by-step guide that can be printed in A4 and laminated for use as a reference source in the classroom.

Access the full sized A4 guide here