If you are a teacher, you can order a free 1GB memory stick from here.

Blurb taken from their website…

Memory Sticks 4 Teachers is a major new ICT initiative taking place within the UK education sector.

Have attended some great sessions at the festival this year.  There seems to be a select group of people cropping up all singing from the same songsheet, one which i’d love a copy of!

Session 1 was fantastic – using Sony PSPs in the classroom. The session was co-led by Tessa Watson and Alicia MacFarlane.

The most intriguing part of this was the use of a PSP as a multi-functional device.  Camera, video, mic, web browser, plus gamer.  This makes it a good alternative to having many separate devices.  A quality wireless connection is obviously needed.  Even without internet access, the functionality and capability with recording video and sound make the PSP an interesting resource.  I know you can record on most digital cameras but with this you then have the gaming function too.

Session 2 was thinking out of the xbox.  EdCompBlog posted live from there!  The session was very engaging and full of great ideas.  There was reinforcement of things I am already doing and using plus a few suggestions and ideas.  Ewan is a very easy to listen to speaker.  He also helpfully posts all his info on his blog, in case the note taking is a bit slow…

Myst III Exile and Tim Rylands featured heavily, again.  Am still trying to work out how to use that in class.  I can see that the game is really visually stimulating, with great descriptions to talk about, but do you write a story or just gain experience in writing quality description of certain scenes?

visuwords (which I’ve used before) and wordle (which stewart cutler has used) look like easy enough tools to use and easy to incorporate into learning also…

We’ve had Comic Life installed on our network for just over 2 weeks now.  In that time we’ve actually done a remarkable amount of work with it.  I had a to give a presenation to Literacy Coordinators about using it, with Literacy, and I was pleasantly surprised that I could draw on so many examples.

Functional Writing

Reading – Summary

I was also able to talk about how we have used it in Imaginative Writing, Science, Blogging and Communicating with Stakeholders…

What an excellent tool.

Hurrah!  Those lovely folks in their ICT tower have installed comic life on all our network machines.  It was previously only on my classroom pc, which is now dead.  This will enable us to work with whole classes when using comic life, rather than just working with the class as a whole.  Does that even make sense?

Planning to use it for:

• Writing: instructions (functional), games guide (functional), comic story strip (imaginative).
• Reading: giving a review of a story, or summarising main points
• Other subjects: alternative way to report back in science etc… to then be put into jotters, or blogged.
• Blogging

Any other suggestions?

Am trying to investigate a few ideas to get the creative juices flowing in writing this year.  We ar no longer Broadbanding for Writing, so will be Scottish Levels A thru E.  Nice. At P7.

There’s Myst of course…with http://www.timrylands.com/ being the cybergod on this…

How have people used this though?  Building on a story, bit by bit, week after week?

Then there are the simple games:

http://amanita-design.net/samorost-1/

http://www.haluz.eu/

Any other ideas to promote creative writing?  Guitar Hero et al I guess..

so, the transfer window has slammed firmly shut.  about time!  what a surprise that Berbs moved to ManYooo.  Bigger surprise is Robinho(od) moving to Madchester City… after declaring his love of all things Chelsea.  Purely a footballing decision of course, nothing to do with getting free oil for life or anything like that…

ah, it is nice to see that loyalty is a key value of footballers everywhere…

whilst city gloat in their petrol powered revolution, icelandic biscuit barrens west ham are something short of a rich tea or summat… bubble well and truly burst as does seem the latest revolution at newtooncastlelikeman.  when will it ever settle down?  or will it continue to be ridiculous for ever?

this weekend we have the big kick off for South Africa 2010.  Another year and a half filled with glorious failure and disappoinment.  Tosh has had the heart of his team ripped out, with all 3 first choice centre halves out and also both strikers missing… our hope is with the Under 21s now… ched of heaven evans and co have a real opportunity ahead of them… here’s hoping…

In an attempt to get away from my favourite playlists, this weekend I have been mostly listening to music beginning with the letter H… well, artists, anyhoo…

featuring…

• The Hold Steady
• Hot Hot Heat
• Hot Puppies
• Howling Bells
• Husky Rescue

What other H artists would you recommend?

Which letter should I go to next?

Footy team + Free bar = ?

Boat trip!

On Saturday we cruised Loch Lomond… on a boat, with a bar.  It was great fun and so peaceful – well outside of the boat was- on the boat, well that stays on the boat!  The water was calm, little breeze, fairly warm, perfect preparation for a new season.

Awards were given out, as was inspiration.  Going to be a good season, I hope.

Probably the worst defensive wall in history?

… but i’m not a hamster…

one of the unfortunate things that will stick in my mind after seeing Bill Bailey in Edinburgh – not like in the street or anything, at the Playhouse actually.  That Killers track will never be the same…

Bill showed what a talented musician he is and what great use of technology he could make in a very funny show.  Don’t want to spoil his material for anyone but we did laugh a lot… although there wasn’t much other noise… which brings me to a discussion we had about Edinburgh/Glasgow audiences (see Guillemots in May!).  I would expect Bill to have had a lot more banter and heckling if he was performing in Glasgow.  I don’t know what impact this would have had on the show, but some of the funniest moments were when he went off on one… following some twisted tangent before ending up in a bit of a comedy Cul de Sac and reversing back to the original line of thought!

Thom Yorke must be gutted… a cover of Creep featuring some Bhangra Beat band with a sitar duel… who’d have thought…

So, the hype, blah blah. Would people still be raving if the actor was alive? Happened a couple of times before I seem to remember… Lee, Phoenix… The Joker was very impressive though. The film, decent, gripping, grown up, heavy, maybe even slightly dark. The Joker was almost too realistic in his madness, was he acting?

Nicely set up for a sequel too. Perhaps after some time of enforced absence, Gotham will need their hero to fight a super villain and will be prepared to forgive all?