Don?t Worry, Be Happy!
Mr W's Blogging Great Thing February 8, 2010, 11:05 pm This was our first day of getting ready for the imminent arrival of the HMIe and we had our first ?war cabinet? meeting. And that?s exactly the wrong terminology to use as it suggests confrontation and fighting? we expect neither from the visit! I?m actually looking forward to meeting the HMIe team and getting the opportunity [...]

Frightened, clueless or uninformed?
Assistive Technology Support Service February 8, 2010, 10:43 pm I just liked this from Seth Godin?s blog and thought I?d share it: Comfort the frightened, coach the clueless and teach the uninformed. Thanks to Jim Burke (ECNing) for tweeting the link. Filed under: Personal, Teaching & Learning

Game of two halves...
Odblog February 8, 2010, 10:29 pm

Categories: s1 and s2, Population, Environmental Hazards, Other
Funny day tomorrow, out for the afternoon, which means I'll need to exit stage left half way through my s1 ICT class, while at the same time covering the morning for Miss Armstrong who is out at a subject group meeting. This means I'll have the s2 class. We have been working on Hot Deserts, and I think myself and Miss E both think it's almost time to move on. Last year, I finished off this part of the topic with a competition, so we're going to run the same again, with prizes (probably HMV vouchers). We partly used the GA Dubai resources, the work of Noel Jenkins, and tried looking at Dubai as a desert anomaly- a hugely populous place in the desert- and what lay in store for it in the future. In particular, we look at tourism and designing a sustainable hotel. I posted about this last year, and the designs that resulted from it were very impressive. This also links into a Google Earth activity where the students have to site the hotel. Miss Armstrongs other class requires a wee bit less in resourcing as they are looking at plate tectonics and have a mapping from memory activity to undertake.
For my own classes, I'll miss s3, who had some good inputs today to discussions around yesterday's video. I have left a little textbook work, but hopefully, technology being well behaved, most of the class should be able to use the 6 million human beings site along with this worksheet as a little extension activity of some of the themes you have been looking at over the last three periods.
For s1, I feel very bad as this class seems to have been disrupted the most by my absences, through illness or other commitments. We had an excellent period today, where many of the class submitted questions to a group of pupils hundreds of miles away at the very start of the period, talked about our own Haiti work, did the Hurricane Experiment, introduced a collaborative mapping activity and ended the lesson singing! Depending on whether it's a geography teacher taking the lesson tomorrow, it's either pop-up hurricanes or moving on to Tony's emotion graph, something I'd rather have held back on, as it doesn't quite fit with where we are, but is probably easiest for another teacher to handle in terms of content.
That's the geography covered. ICT sounded like an interesting lesson on Friday. The class were asked to design a mobile phone of the future. I don't know how much direction they were given in terms of this, but I had a chat with Ian Stuart tonight, who made a few suggestions which I can bring into the lesson tomorrow, including starting by rating their own phone. This links in quite well, I suppose, with some of the work the class did about computer hardware and add ons.

National Schools Quiz ? Register Now!
RHPS: Curriculum for Excellence February 8, 2010, 10:21 pm The Next Generation Learning National Schools Quiz is coming! Register your interest here now! REGISTER HERE Download Press Release Aimed at primary school children, the quiz will cover curriculum areas from history, science, citizenship, numeracy and literacy. Your pupils will love this fun and interactive way of learning. You can choose whether your pupils participate on their [...]

Godzilla!!
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Isaac has created this fantastic Godzilla movie with tons of special effects ! - and it is our Computer Club's first paper based animation. Congratulations Isaac !

A bit of ego stroking
adamsutcliffe.net February 8, 2010, 10:03 pm I got this from The Generator Blog. It does your ego no end of good.

Holiday
mrp6a February 8, 2010, 9:50 pm Our mid-term break is coming up. Look out for posts on our return next Tuesday 16th! addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fmrp6a.edublogs.org%2F2010%2F02%2F08%2Fholiday%2F'; addthis_title = 'Holiday'; addthis_pub = '';

The Sun, Moon and Earth Show
Campie Primary School February 8, 2010, 9:42 pm P2 and P1/2 joined Benny and Jack on a journey of discovery while they learned what children in different places around the world are doing at exactly the same time. Why is one child getting up just as another goes to bed? We all thoroughly enjoyed the show and it made us think carefully about what [...]

TESS Article: ?Them? + ?Us? = ?We?
Don's Learning Blog February 8, 2010, 9:40 pm This is a draft of my next article for the Times Educational Supplement Scotland.  It?s based on a previous post with a good dollop of ideas borrowed from my good friend John Connell.   I reckon one of the greatest challenges facing Scottish education is the way in which people use the third person plural in a negative sense. Listen to [...]

Coursework
Forrester High School Info Systems Class Blog February 8, 2010, 9:19 pm In information systems we did coursework about databases. We had to make our own database and design our own field types and design our own layouts. We had to print evidence out to pass the coursework. After we did a similar task where we related a keeper database to an animal database. We printed out what [...]

Glow ? first impressions
Helen Gorman's teaching blog February 8, 2010, 9:06 pm I?ve been interested in online learning tools for some time; I initially wanted to set up a Moodle (although I didn?t really know how ? but that?s what Google?s for) but for one reason and another decided waiting for Glow was a better option (although in the meantime I have set up ? and recently [...]