I have posted in the past about lots of great free software. However I did not have a central place for the links. I have fixed that, if you look to the right you will see the new “Free Software” links.
I will post new links here as I use or find them. It might get a little busy, I do get bored quite easily, so I may tidy it up into sub categories when it reaches 20 or so links.
We had a demo in school of some software to help Dyslexic pupils. During the discussion the Scottish voice project was brought up.
The Scottish Government funds CALL Scotland to provide a Scotland-wide schools licence for ‘Heather’ and ‘Stuart’ – a high quality Scottish computer voice from CereProc in Edinburgh. The voice is licenced for schools, colleges, universities and NHS patients. Heather and Stuart can be downloaded from this web site and are also available on CD from CALL Scotland (schools only). Pupils and students can also install the voices on home computers.
Once installed on your computer, you can use Heather or Stuart with most ‘text-to-speech’ programs to read: electronic books; PDF files (such as SQA exam papers); worksheets and other documents in Microsoft Word. You can also create audio files using the voice. The Scottish Voices can also be used on talking internet browsers to help pupils and students read materials made available on and through Glow.
This software allows the computer to speak with a Scottish voice, and pretty good it is too. Now as much fun as Heather and Stuart are, they are useless without some software. A quick search of the internet will give you a lot of software which ranges in price from free to expensive. The Scottish Voice site also mentions some free software that uses word but I can’t test it at home as it does not appear to work with my setup here, I will test it at work and let you know how I get on with it.
TTSAPP is very easy to work with and allows you to produce WAV (sound) files that can be used in blogs or podcasts. Here is an example I created from the text of this site. I had to convert it to MP3, as Glow Blogs does not allow WAV file types, I used audacity.
I plan to test out these voices with Muvizu and see if I can’t overcome some of the stage fright that appears to be plaguing some of my pupils 🙂
Well this year I decided to take the paper exercise, online. I have used survey monkey and even Glow in the past but this year I though I would give Google forms a try.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/IzgaUOW6GIs" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]
I will post some graphs of the results when they are all in
So our new whole school photo screen saver is now up and running. There are still a couple of bugs to be worked out the system but these can be worked around just now.
The screens in the school are nearly all 4×3 aspect ratio. This means when you create your advert you need to think landscape. Powerpoint is your friend here as it allows you to create 4×3 landscape by default.
This has been around for a while and I always meant to get round to using it but there was never the occation. Well this week our pupils have been hard at work creating and designing our new entrance space. We have used a blog to gather ideas and plan a wall display with all the ideas. I wanted a way of capturing the detail of the wall display so I thought of Photosynth.
I took my trusty 5MP class Kodak and went snapping. I had no idea of what to do, so I just snapped away for 5 minutes or so. I took the memory card home (good chance the software won’t work in school) and installed photosynth on my PC. The app appears to be little more than a bulk uploader, I would guess there are some pretty big servers in the Photosynth basement doing the work. It asked me for a name and description then off it went. Pretty soon I had the following result (Press play button for what I think is the best effect)
I was fairly happy with the result but I wanted a nice panorama. I had taken a panoramic shot at the start of the shoot, so fired it into Image Composite Editor and got the following. I even saved it as a PNG, but at 30MB I will keep it off the blog.
So what next? Well I plan to reshoot the whole thing once it is up on display properly.
Oh and as a side note it would have been better if the kids didn’t wite upside down, but that’s round tables for you 😉
All in all a nice little piece of free software 🙂 Oh! did I mention there is an iPhone app of the same name that does the same thing?
The Royal Society have published their report into the state of Computer Science in school in both England and Scotland.
Here are their main findings.
Main findings
1. The current delivery of Computing education in many UK schools is highly unsatisfactory. Although existing curricula for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are broad and allow scope for teachers to inspire pupils and help them develop interests in Computing, many pupils are not inspired by what they are taught and gain nothing beyond basic digital literacy skills such as how to use a word-processor or a database.
This is mainly because:
1.1 The current national curriculum in ICT can be very broadly interpreted and may be reduced to the lowest level where non specialist teachers have to deliver it;
1.2 there is a shortage of teachers who are able to teach beyond basic digital literacy;
1.3 there is a lack of continuing professional development for teachers of Computing;
1.4 features of school infrastructure inhibit effective teaching of Computing.
2. There is a need to improve understanding in schools of the nature and scope of Computing. In particular there needs to be recognition that Computer Science is a rigorous academic discipline of great importance to the future careers of many pupils. The status of Computing in schools needs to be recognised and raised by government and senior management in schools.
3. Every child should have the opportunity to learn Computing at school, including exposure to Computer Science as a rigorous academic discipline.
4. There is a need for qualifications in aspects of Computing that are accessible at school level but are not currently taught. There is also a need for existing inappropriate assessment methods to be updated.
5. There is a need for augmentation and coordination of current Enhancement and Enrichment activities to support the study of Computing.
6. Uptake of Computing A-level is hindered by lack of demand from higher education institutions.
This builds on a lot of what the government has been saying this week, it looks like changes are coming.
It seemed like such an easy task when I started doing it.
Take a powerpoint slideshow and display it before the user logins in, on our workstations.
I wanted to display revision notes on our XP workstations in the Business ICT suites, when they were sitting unused.
I settled on exporting the slides as JPGs and using a photo screensaver to display a folder. I started with a GPO delivered from our server but this only allowed me to force the user screensaver to the ssmypics.scr, which then displayed the users My Pictures folder. It was a disaster, all the kids downloaded images started popping up at random during lessons. I scrapped that and took to the net, a lot of the sites recommended redirecting the “My Pictures” to a single network share, not my preferred choice in a school.
Two sites were very useful and slowly a solution began to present itself.
My solution
Any time we want to change the images we just update them and the admin pushes out the changes. I guess other departments will want to use this at some point. If they do we can create a SS folder in their subject areas and use the GPO to copy the right graphics files across at machine boot.
Anyway I hope this helps someone, feel free to leave a comment I will answer ASAP.
I am a big supporter of open source software. You just have to look down my posts to see that most of these pages use “free” software or sites. It is worth bearing in mind however, that you can get full versions of software packages for student and teacher prices. Have a look around the web before you buy the version bundled with this Christmas’ laptop, you can get a full version of office for less than £40 and that will cover two machines.
Check out dreamspark if you are planning to study computer science at university, it can give you a lot of software for no layout and this can be used to prepare for the courses you might undertake.
The web is full of sites doing backgrounds and logos, bgpatterns is nice and simple. The choice of images is quite limited but the tile effect is quite pleasing.
Also don’t forget about cooltext.
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