A Simple Blog

I have just come across this widget on Promethean Planet that allows you to add the search functionality to different web 2.0 type places on the web.  Here goes….

I have been working with teachers over the last fortnight to look at how ICT can be embedded into all of the foundation subjects. One thing we looked at was how to use ICT to support a topic on musical rounds. We looked at how Audacity could be used to record a single track of the round (e.g. Londons Burning) and then by copying it and sliding it on multiple tracks it could be used to create a round.

As we worked through the process it actually highlighted certain technical elements of the round itself. (e.g. London’s Burning London’s Burning needs to take the same amount of time as ‘Fetch the Engines Fetch the Engines’) The recording provided a visual representation of the need for these sections to be the same length of time.

Implementing the idea in a lesson.

There are many different ways of introducing this idea, but we decided that as the pupils hadn’t seen the software or done much recording before, we would use the projector as a display and record the whole class singing the single track. The Audacity file would then be saved for the class to access over the school network.

Finally, pupils would be shown how to copy the sound onto additional tracks, realign the tracks to form ‘a round’ and how to delete sections of unwanted sound.

The pupils would then open the file and try to produce their versions of the round.

Feedback

I am interested to know if anyone has used this type of software in a similar way before and if it has been successful etc. I am also interested to know if small numbers of computers have been used at any one time, or if all of the class have worked on the project at once.

Any comments will be gratefully received.

I will let you all know how the lesson goes.

If Blogs are to be effective they should be regularly updated, but going to each individual blog to check for updated information could take a lot of precious time.  (Something that is in short supply).  This is where aggregators come in useful, as you can set these to keep an ‘electronic eye’ on your chosen blogs, and they will alert you if there are any new posts, making it very quick to scan through to see if anything that interests you has been added.

There are a number of these aggregators available.  I currently use ‘Bloglines’. If you want to sign up for a free Bloglines account click here and you can start adding your favourite blogs.

There are many places that you can go to set up a blog. Edublogs host this blog, but a number of the blogs on my blogroll are hosted by ethink. Both of these providers use ‘Wordpress’ blogging technology so they will feel very similar, although the range of styles that they offer to change your ‘look and feel’ differ significantly.

To sign up for an edublogs blog click here.

To sign up for an ethink blog click here (this is hosted in Shropshire).

Edublogs also provide a link to a 3 minute tutorial click here to watch and listen (note headphones or speakers will be necessary to access the useful information). Click here to see some more links to tutorials.

We are holding a twilight session tonight to look at blogging in the classroom. We hope to add any new sites that are created to our ‘blogroll’ so that we can see how schools are using this technology.

By the end of the session we hope that everyone will have:

• viewed at least two existing blogs
• added a comment to an existing blog
• set up a blog for themselves (or their school)
• set up some categories to organise posts
• added a post to their blog and assigned it to a relevant category
• edited a post
• explored the ‘dashboard’ and ‘options’ to see how the blog could be modified and posts, categories etc can be modified.
• had a look at available themes to alter the look and feel of their blog

We would also be very grateful if people could add a comment to this post before they leave, providing one way that they might use (or choose not to use) this technology within their school.

I have recently worked with a few Foundation Stage teachers who have commented that they do not like the fact that Word automatically changes initial letters in tables to capitals.  When creating word lists this can make more work causing people to go back and change the letters back to lowercase letters.

To stop Word making these corrections click on ‘Tools’, ‘AutoCorrect Options’ and remove the ticks next to ‘Capitalise first letters of sentences’ and ‘Capitalise first letter of table cells’ then click on ‘OK’.

It has been brought to my attention that a lot of people are fed up with the automatically created ‘drawing canvas’ appearing when people use the autoshapes feature in Word. If you are one of these people, feel reassured that it is easy to turn off.

Go to ‘Tools’, ‘Options’ and click on the ‘General tab’ then click on the box next to ‘Automatically create drawing canvas when inserting autoshapes’, the tick should disappear, now click ‘OK’ and enjoy using the autoshapes!

Music Explorer is a very versatile piece of software for composing and manipulating sounds. As a fairly old piece of software, it has a number of limitations on saving, and means that pupils often create great compositions, but can’t then export these in a format to publish.

You can get around this problem by recording the Music Explorer composition into Sound Recorder (this recording takes place internally, so you do not require a microphone), and then saving the file as a ‘wav’ file. This allows you to import the composition into many different software applications, e.g. Powerpoint, 2 Create a Story, Kar2ouche etc.

All schools in Telford have access to the 2Simple Music Toolkit (this can be downloaded from Control Panel). This is a useful piece of software to use with pupils from foundation right through to upper KS2. The software comprises of a suite of programs that get progressively harder as you go along the launcher. It is also useful to know that you can export the music out for use with other pieces of software. e.g. pupils could compose a piece of music to run behind a Powerpoint presentation.