Digitalkatie's blog

[image: My Photo]

Recent Posts

•A Dance In the Dark Every Monday •Teaching the basics...of how to write a letter •Samba de Amigo! •Giraffe Hero: the making of... •Back to blogging •TeachMeet08 @ the Scottish Learning Festival •Mobile Learning Trial: a reflection? •Pondering the future at work... •Virtual fieldtrip to a water treatment plant •Visiting the High School for Global Citizenship

Categories

•Brain Gym •Computing •Education •Film •Fun •Games •Internet •Media •Mobile Learning •Personal •Red Cross •Second Life •Sign Language •Sproglet •Technology •Web/Tech •Weblogs

Archives

•November 2008 •September 2008 •May 2008 •April 2008 •March 2008 •February 2008 •January 2008 •December 2007 •November 2007 •October 2007
More...

My photos

•www.flickr.com This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from digitalkatie. Make your own badge here.

About You

•
•[image: Locations of visitors to this page]
•Visits since 24/09/06 [image: Free Counter]
•[image: Geo Visitors Map]

About Me

•My website •My CV •My Flickr pics •My Wiki

SL Pics

•
www.flickr.com
[image: photos in Second Life and Education] More photos in Second Life and Education

About

My Other Accounts

•[image: Skype]Skype: digitalkatie •[image: Twitter]Twitter: Digitalkatie •[image: YouTube]YouTube: Digitalkatie

November 11, 2008

A Dance In the Dark Every Monday

I was teaching the Software Development Process today.  We have covered all the stages when doing programming, and we have recently reviewed them by designing a laptop for kids aged 6-10 (this isn't software, I know, but I wanted them to learn and remember the process and stages)
Today we looked at remembering all the stages.  The boring way is:
A Dance In The Dark Every Monday
for the stages of:
•Analysis •Design •Implementation •Testing •Documentation •Evaluation •Maintenance
Some alternatives the class came up with were:
•A Duck In The Duckpond Every Minute •Ask David If The Dog Enjoys Milk •A Diamond Is Too Darn Elegant, Man! •Auntie Diana Is Taking Drugs Every Monday •A Dalek Impersonates The Doctor Every Minute •Ask Dumbledore If the Dormitories Ever Mix
Posted by Digitalkatie on November 11, 2008|Permalink|Comments (0)|TrackBack (0)

September 30, 2008

Teaching the basics...of how to write a letter

With our fancy Web 2.0 world we sometimes forget to teach the basics.
I have been teaching Word Processing to my third years. Today I asked them to type a letter. I showed them how to lay out the page and what information to include and when to put 'sincerely' instead of 'faithfully'.
Their task was to write a letter to someone of their own choosing - a family member or friend far away, a politician about something they feel strongly about, or someone famous if they could find a postal address online (via an agent or organisation if necessary).
Once the letters were written we printed them, signed them, folded them, put them in envelopes, addressed the envelope and put a stamp on it. This was all a bit of a novelty to them. They were unfamiliar with the conventions of where to write the address and put the stamp on the envelope. One pupil wrote the school address in tiny writing on the front of the envelope instead the address of Arsenal F.C.
They then didn't know how to fold the paper to then fit it in the envelope. One pupil held up the A4 paper and the envelope, waving it at me with a look of confusion on his face. I'm not even sure he knew it NEEDED folded.
They have all now written letters to famous people and are very excited at the possibility of getting a response (no matter how unlikely I said it might be). All of the pupils have chosen to post their letter themselves (I checked they knew how to post a letter!). One girl didn't seal the letter so she could show her mum :-)
Also today I was doing an SQA programming task with my fourth years about paying staff who make food mixers. First I need to give a different example about making microwaves instead as most of the pupils won't have seen a food mixer before or even know what one is. We can sometimes make a lot of cultural assumptions in teaching and it's sometimes strange what you end up teaching young people.
Posted by Digitalkatie on September 30, 2008|Permalink|Comments (2)|TrackBack (0)

September 28, 2008

Samba de Amigo!

[image: Samba de amigo] We bought Samba de Amigo yesterday.  It was our anniversary present to each other (yes, we're that sad!)  It is brilliant, even better than when it was on the Dreamcast.  Our friend Stuart had it and would bring it to our New Year's Day parties and we would hook it up to a data projector I had borrowed from work.  Ah those were the days! (Of course the vast amount of alcoholic cocktails helped with the inhibitions of standing shaking maracas)
We started to get quite despondent.  It took us about half an hour to configure the game.  The key factor is the new version is not so dependent on height as the Dreamcast version, where you would have to enter your height into the game.
The Wii version also factors in angle of the wiimotes/maracas.  If you are shaking high, point the wiimotes upwards.  You don't actually have to lift them too much.  For the middle shakes, keep the wiimotes level.  For posing with both wiimotes to one side (this is where we had the major block in the configuration stage) point them behind you.  It seems to work. 
Happy Samba-ing everyone!
...