teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

Yesterday saw the death of a loved one. During open-heart surgery to upgrade its hard disk, I’ve managed to kill my rather lovely Sony sub-notebook. It’ll be broken up and go to eBay heaven, no doubt. Desperate attempts at resuscitation prevented me from posting yesterday… Today I’ve been trying to stop thinking about ways I can fix it long enough to work out a positiong on the use of computer games in education. I’ve put some thoughts and links on the bliki (contribute.mrbelshaw.co.uk). Your comments and contributions are, as ever, welcome and appreciated! :)

Those who use the Internet as often as I do may find the Scrapbook extension for Firefox useful. It has the ability to add virtual sticky notes to web pages, capture tabs for offline browsing, and more!

We all want to make lessons relevant to our students, but it’s easy to get out of touch with teen culture. Here’s a quick tip – have a look at PeerMind to see the most downloaded music/movies/games/software/ ringtones and regain at least some credibility…

OK, so this might not be for everyone, but in the latest EdTechTalk podcast Jeff mentioned that PodZinger now provides RSS feeds of podcasts. What does this mean in practice? Well, you can search for example ‘educational technology‘, subscribe to the RSS feed that is produced, and then import it into iTunes. You will then get the relevant segment of the podcast that mentions your search term (in this case ‘educational technology’)

Miles Berry has blogged about some research by Valentine, Marsh and Pattie who questioned 1200 pupils across 12 primary and secondary schools during the summer term 2004 about their home use of computers. Around 89% had access and, two years later, the figure is likely to be higher now. Makes the need for that departmental website/blog/wiki/podcast seem all the more urgent…

Another day without supply work so more time spent on my new bliki at contribute.mrbelshaw.co.uk, a contribution to Ed’s onedamnthing.org.uk wiki, an application form filled in and letter written, a swift bike ride, a bit of housework and too much time browsing eBay. Time to process what I’ve been thinking about a skills-based curriculum… :p

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I came across this list of fifty ways of note-taking. They’re divded into the following sections: Quick Public Pages, Basic Note Taking, Development, Online Documents, Voice Recording, Start Pages, and Online Databases. This might be useful for yourself (my personal wiki is proving useful for my Ed.D. research) or to stimulate student collaboration/involvement!

The most geniunely funny things are usually so because they cut quite close to the bone. Take this parody about if the surrealist painter M.C. Escher were in school today (and if you don’t know who he was, check out Wikipedia)

I want more interaction so I’ve set up a bliki. No, that’s not me practicing South African lingo – I’ve set up a cross between a blog and a wiki at contribute.mrbelshaw.co.uk. “Why?” I hear you all ask. Well, I’ve been getting rather frustrated with the implication with blogs that just because something was posted last week/last month/in the past it is somehow ‘old’ and not to be commented upon. A bliki combines the best features of wikis and blogs to give the solution I need. Don’t worry, I’m not abandoning this blog. I’ll just be posting things that I’m going to be working on longer-term at the new sister site! Go and have a look and tell me what you think… :D

Neil Jones has brought to my attention Vimeo, a service which is to video sharing what Flickr is to photo sharing. Looks great!