Cross-curricular #harvest

My 5yr old daughter uses freshly-picked sloes to practice counting in 10s and 1s.

There were 53.

Identification challenge

I saw these in Quinton Road, Harborne. Does anyone know what they are? Crab apples maybe?

Picking Plums at Paganel

Download now or watch on posterous

picking_plums_short.wmv (8130 KB)

Collaborating on Spreadsheets

Paganel staff collaborate on Google spreadsheets to analyse data and organise maths sets

Sent from my thingamajig

10 years of not re-inventing the wheel.

Here's 10 years of stuff that was created or bought, used once and then put in the PPA room for future use. Only it wasn't used again.

Now it's going in a skip... Is this a senseless waste or a constructive use of time and space?

First reflections on the impact of calendar training

Today I gave some training on using Google Calendars.

The training had two useful outcomes:

1. It showed how useful online Calendars are and everybody grasped the basics of how to add events.
2. It got everyone together in the same room to sort out some important rotas for the year.

I began planning the training back on August 25th when I wrote this blog post about my ideas for this training. Soon after I hit a snag with my decision making, when I'd been trying to kill too many ICT birds with one stone - I had ended up taking one step forward for every two steps back. I then decided to use videos as my main vehicle for the instruction. I even included a second video to really go over how to create repeated events, in case staff didn't quite get it. I used Google Sites as the repository for the training:

• A resource page
• A task page
• A feedback page
• An impact page

What was really interesting was the the whole 'I'm not going to talk approach'. I'm so used to presenting with

• a little preamble,
• a spot of humour,
• some theory,
• practical application,
that it was really weird just letting my video do the talking - we didn't even watch the video as a group (which would have been a bit embarrassing).

Rather each teacher had headphones and watched it individually - there was an eerie silence around the place. Then, as people started to get it there was a slow murmur as people sitting near to each other explained or clarified their thinking about the task in hand or the instructions. Then the volume grew as the first events started appearing on the calendar and some people started to realise that they may miss all the best slots. This point was perhaps the most tense - a slight tone of anxiety creeping into the odd voice here and there. But finally everyone realised that we're all colleagues still and began talking constructively about what slots to fill in. Within half an hour the training was finished, the calendars were done and staff were on there way to do stuff elsewhere.

What's good for the staff now is that they all have a common framework and understanding of how Google Calendars work, with an expectation of being able to use them productively in the future. What's good for me is that I've got the bulk of the rotas sorted without having to traipse around the school.

Help! Workflow crisis!

First day back at school and we begin with the usual. Big picture stuff: what happened last year and how we can get better.

Then the inevitable policy tweaks - and here's one: educational visits. They're the kind of activity that children remember, makes classroom learning more real, but can be a nightmare for teachers to organise and schools to administer. Having listened to the talk by the EVC (Educational Visits co-ordinator), I tried to draw out the workflow on my new ACECAD Digital Notepad. But it looks a bit complicated.

So 2 questions...

1. Does anyone have a really smooth and efficient process for educational visits?
2. Are there any good software packages for presenting flow diagram type material?