All posts by John

I am a teacher, currently working in Banton Primary for North Lanarkshire Council. I also act as Product Owner/provide support for Glow Blogs. I like Blogs.

#dlw16 Digital Learning Week Homework

Education Scotland Digital Learning Week Logo 

Thought I’d assign some homework for schools in Digital Learning Week 

This principally aimed at senior phase. 

In no particular order. 

1. How good is your school wifi and are you ready for learners to bring their own devices ?

2. Have you got a clear policy that encourages learners and teachers  to use their own devices in class and around the school  ?

3. Have you worked out how to close the digital divide – can you supply learners,  who don’t have access to a device that can reliably at least browse the internet with a suitable device – ideally for school time and to take home ? hint –  Kindle Fires are good value at moment.

4. How confident are your teachers in making the best use of GLOW – blogging , sharing , publishing their learning and teaching resources, working collaboratively with learners to create content with teacher and learners in other schools across Scotland and internationally ?

5. Have you worked out a policy or mechanism for making the best use of massive open on-line courses for staff and for pupil development ?

6. How much learning content created under Creative Commons Licences do your teachers and pupils produce each year and what platforms are you publishing this on ?

7. How good is your learning community at defining and describing your local area – do you use Google and other maps and suitable review sites as opportunities for teachers and learners to produce content.

8. Have you trained any Wikipedians – what are the Wikipedia entries like for your school and for the region that surrounds your school ?  How can you improve these ?

9. Digital literacy – have you a mechanism for measuring this across your learning community and a means of developing this for teachers and learners on an ongoing basis ?

10. Do you use technology to give learners an opportunity to showcase their work – and do you use it to cut down on meetings and use it for useful things like internal verification, across your school , across the local authority , nationally ?

11. How many on-line courses are your learners using as a supplement to or as an addition to normal classes and are you timetabling these to increase the choice available to senior phase learners and to make non-viable subject choices viable in your school ?

12. E-Books – have you worked out that many of the classic texts are now freely available as they are out of copyright and have you a strategy for making sure teachers and learners make the most of resources like this ?

13. Do most subject teachers have their own YouTube channel with a stream of helpful revision clips from a range of sources to support learners and/or what social platforms are they doing this on ?

14. Have you opened up a lot of your on-line learning to help and support parents – who would benefit from access to this learning ?

15. How many Microsoft Innovator Teachers , Google Certified , Apple or Intel or other trained teachers do you have and do you value your digital leaders ?

16. Do you know what an open badge is and have you worked out ways for your teachers and learners to build some open badges and award these ?

17. Has your school organised or supported a teachmeet ? Do you encourage teachers to contribute to #Pedagoo – do you regularly talk about how digital learning is changing the face of learning – talking about the pedagogy and the on-line resources freely available ?

18. If you think digital learning is still about – composing and sending emails , opening , creating and saving a document and using presentation software , a data projector or an electronic whiteboard and that phones are a needless distraction in school.  Then please ignore  1-17

About this #dlw16 Blog

National Digital Learning Week, #digilearnscot, is running from 16th to 20th May 2016:

Explore the benefits digital learning and teaching can bring to every level of the learner journey. Share your stories of how you’ve been using digital to support, enhance and improve classroom practice. Inspire others and be inspired.

Digital Learning Community

Here on Glow blogs we are hoping to have some digital fun during the week.

This site will:

  1. Aggregate blog posts about National Digital Learning Week from around Scotland
  2. Provide some digital challenges for you to blog about.

What You Do

Sign Up

You need a publicly available blog, this can be a Glow blogs but other public blogs will work too.

Before you sign up you need to make a post on your blog with the category #dlw16

More information about signing up on the Sign Up page.

Create Posts

You can blog about any of your Digital Learning Week activities, and/or you can write posts in response to any of our challenges.

What Happens

When you write your posts they are syndicated onto this blog. They will show up on the Posts page.

This means that people can see lots of activity in the same place. Hopefully we will be able to use this to comment on each others posts. If you click on a post here you will be taken to the original blog to comment.

#dlw01 What Does Digital Learning Look Like in Your School

What does digital learning look like in your school?
Your response could be an image, a mind-map, a sway, video or audio podcast or even some words.

You might like to brainstorm both what digital learning looks like in your school and how to share that digitally.

Is digital learning different from other learning?

You can upload images, video and audio  to your blog, embed a sway or just write a post. For other content like mind maps you could take a screenshot and embed that as an image.

Post your response to your blog using the category #dlw16 and tag it #dlw01

Remember you need to have Joined in with the #dlw16 blog for your posts to appear here.

The featured immage on this post is Binary, Null, Digital, Silhouette from Pixabay it is used under a CC0 Public Domain license, see: Terms of Service

#DLW02 Icons

An icon, when talked about in computing, is a picture which usually stands for a computer program, computer file, folder, or an action for a program to do. Icons are usually small pictures, but not always. Sometimes the user can change what size an icon is.  Computer icon – Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

We see icons everywhere.

Could you design an icon?

Things to think about:

What makes a good icon?  Shape? Colour?

Susan Kare, who designed the original apple logo says:

Good icons should be more like road signs than illustrations, easily comprehensible, and not cluttered with extraneous detail

For this challenge we want you to design an icon. It could stand for your school, your class or anything else.

Making Icons

You can create icons with many types of software. They are generally limited in size and made up of pixels. A real challenge would be to make an icon 16 by 16 pixels.

16x16

or 32×32

32x32

or 64×64

piskel is a webpage that lets you make icons.

You can also make them with Microsoft Paint.

paint-1

Open Paint

On the Home Tab click Image then Resize.

 

paint-2

 

In the dialog:

  1. Highlight Pixels
  2. Uncheck Maintain Aspect Ration
  3. Set Horizontal & Vertical to 16

 

paint-3

The canvas will resize. Set the Zoom to the maximum 800%

paint-4

Show the Grid: View Check Gridlines

paint-5

 

Draw your icon (You can do better than this)

paint-6

 

Set the zoom to 100% to see the real size.

paint-7

 

You can save your icon as a png and insert it in your blog. How many icons can your class make. you could make a whole set.

Post your response toy your blog using the category #dlw16 and tag it #dlw02

 

#DLW03 Photoblitz

Most of our photos are digital now.  Digital cameras or devices that take digital images are great to use in learning. A photoblitz is a way to give you a chance to practise taking picture.

Use this list to take and think about pictures post them to your blog as a Gallery. Remember to categorise them as dlw16 and tag them dlw03.

  1. How do ants see the world? Change your viewpoint. Make a photograph with your camera at floor level.
  2. Pattern is built on repetition, like a rhythm. A regular or irregular pattern.
  3. Make a photograph that illustrates the weather where you are.
  4. They’re all around. Make a photograph of a wheel near you.
  5. Black and white photographs are a classic look.
  6. A perfect line. Make a photo of interesting vertical, horizontal, or diagonal lines.
  7. Make a landscape photo!
  8. Challenge: Silhouettes are an interesting way to abstract a subject.
  9. Create an interesting photo that includes looking through one object to see another
  10. A photo representing 100
  11. The edge of a knife, the waters edge, or some other edge.

Here are some photography tips:

  • Hold the camera still, elbows in, make a triangle.
  • Think before you shoot
  • Take more than one photo
  • Change Angles
  • Zoom with your feet
  • Place the subject off-centre
  • Keep the sun behind you (unless you want a silhouette)
  • Learn about the rule of thirds

2bc4c

Rule of Thirds photo from wikimedia used under a creative commons CC-BY license.

 

#DLW04 Digital Storytelling

There are many different digital tools that can be used to tell stories. There are several that can be use in Glow, Office Video, Glow Blogs and many more. Stories could be something that has really happened or fictional.

This challenge is to tell the same story with different tools. Can you tel the same story with a sway, a video or a podcast. What if you write your story in a blog post or use PowerPoint. Can you make a story just with sound effects.

Post your stories to your blog using the category #dlw16 and tag it #dlw04

Try and see if you can write a little about the difference the different methods of storytelling make.

Featured image on this post Digital Storytelling by Giulia Forsythe used under a Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

#dlw05 Make You Own Challenge

 

If you don’t see a challenge you like on this blog why not make up your own.

Describe your challenge on your blog   using the category #dlw16 and tag it #dlw05

Remember you need to have Joined in with the #dlw16 blog for your posts to appear here.

Once someone has posted a challenge, you can respond to it on your own blog.