Transformation Teachers Programme

I promised myself that I would be in bed bfore midnight and with 5  mins to go I will rush this post.  I just checked the apple website to see the design award winners and was pleased to see that Screenflow one of our recommended pieces of software for the TTP has won awards in two categories – good to see that we have people who agree with us that this is an excellent piece of software.

Apple Design Awards 2008

Three mins to go and so here they are.  These are links to free whiteboard resources that you could include in your whiteboard outcomes that you have to produce for this course.

Yenka free Resources

Crocodile Clips have some other sample material for science

Ok it’s midnight and I must go to bed as I need to be very early tomorrow.  Whoops 1 min late but I’m gone……

• What you see as the main advantages and opportunities of using blogs in the classroom
• What you see as the main obstacles to or issues with using blogs in the classroom
• How you might be able to incorporate blogs into your teaching. Think about teaching groups, units of work, whether you will use a class blog only or set up student blogs, etc.

For additional inspiration, check out Sue Kambalu’s post here, where she lists a veritable plethora of blogs in different subject areas!  She has a lot of other posts on blogging too – use the categories on the right of her blog to find more.

2. Visit the blogs of at least 2 other participants and comment on their posts.  NB: you will have to moderate the comments of others on your own blog – click here for instructions on how to do this.

3. Like every good task, this has an extension activity!  This is for you to get familiar with your blog in your own time, as only then will you have the confidence to use one with students.  Explore the links to edublogs tutorials on this blog (see Judy’s post here), or you can click here to go to the APS training blog, with instructions on various aspects of blogging.  As a bare minimum, I recommend being able to:

• customise your theme and add basic widgets (there’s a world of widgets to explore later!)
• Write a post and write a page
• Upload pictures
• Add a link to your blogroll and customise headings on your blogroll so you can organise links
• Manage comments

Happy blogging! 

Please log into your blog and write a short post reflecting on what you think your dominant learning style is.

Then use one of the links on the TTP Blog relating to learning styles and answer the questions. Write another post reflecting on the results that you are given. Does knowing about our own learning styles and those of our students affect the way that we deliver lessons. If so how?

The CLC has used Canon digital cameras successfully with both pupils and teachers for the last 6 years. The reasons that we have chosen this camera for the Transformation Teachers Programme are as follows.

The video quality is excellent providing you with 640 x 480 size video in .avi format which can be easily taken into the software packages that you have been provided with.

The quality of photograph obtained from these cameras is very high.

There is image stabalisation.

The flip screen allows you to use the camera discreetly to capture evidence of work in the classroom.

Negative point – The audio can be poor if you are using the video element too far away from the pupils or situation.

Please comment on the camera and your first impressions. For the 17th May you will be expected to have taken photos that are relevant to a topic that you teach, the number of photos is up to you but a minimum of 10 is expected. We would also like you to record 4 or 5 short (20 seconds) pieces of video eg students at work in the class, a presentation, an experiment etc. We will be working on downloading these elements onto your new computers and using them in some of the software.

Please follow the blogging rules established for this site.

Add a comment to this post describing your views of the camera.